In The Belly Of The Fish

by Cagey Williams Smith

Through the pitted framing of the abandoned car, pass the thicket of weeds and brush growing up under the chassis, the squeaky sound of bike brakes sneaks through the debris. Marisa quietly stays low. With a few snickers under her breath, she inches closer to the cracked dashboard, spying on Uncle Terry as he props his black bike against the corner of the house. The sunlight shines hard off his prominent forehead where his hair bulges somewhere between an afterthought and a style. He has a wiry frame and thin long neck, and Uncle Terry is Marisa’s momma’s older sister’s boy, which makes him Marisa’s second cousin, but she liked to think of him as her uncle, being older and all. Uncle Terry favors more of the Creole side with small, artistically deft hands, cinnamon colored skin, a thin nose exuding some European transgression, and a mannerism that is easy. Whether it was summer or winter, his clothes of choice are the simplistic attire of denim and a white cotton Tee.

“Uncle Terry…” Marisa hisses from the weeds.

Uncle Terry bows up, curiously lifting his head like a giraffe.

Ducking behind the dashboard, Marisa stuffs giggles back in her mouth; her brown eyes darting around with elated anticipation. Uncle Terry wanders the yard, his casual gait following the bush-line, then peers over toward the chicken coop.

“Marisa, where are you?” says he, tilting his head attempting to hear her breathing.

Marisa holds her breath. Moments pass with great exhilaration. There’s a subtle cracking of twigs, the wispy sound of tall grass being pressed flat, and when it all becomes still, Marisa curiously raises her head up to peek over the dash, only to encounter Uncle Terry’s face looming down from the passenger side window.

“What are you doing?” he quickly says.

“No fair,” Marisa dejectedly pouts. “You find me all the time.”

Watching her clamor out of the open window, he asks, “Why aren’t you in school?”

Marisa holds her keys and says nothing, making Uncle Terry follow her through the web of draped vines. “Telly had a coughing spell. Momma needed me to stay home and tend to her.”

“Is that so?”

Uncle Terry’s easy way, almost a child’s curiosity, has him standing just far enough from one’s personal space so as not to crowd, yet close enough to show interest. And he speaks differently, it’s clutter-free, never butchering words how everybody in her family does. All this makes Uncle Terry seem like he’s from some exotic country across a great ocean. And because of that, she adores Uncle Terry.

“Your momma shouldn’t do that. You hear me? I heard about the truancy letter. Did your mother tell you about the meeting she had with the schoolboard?”

Marisa’s head drops. “Momma said summer break is next week no how.”

“Marisa, if your momma didn’t go to that meeting last week, they would have put her in jail. Did she tell you about that?”

“Telly had an awful coughing spell.”

“I believe you, Marisa. I do, it’s just that school is the most important thing you have to do right now…”

“What about Telly?” Marisa protectively says. “She needs someone to look out for her.”

“Yes, she does, and you do a very good job of it. But someone else should do the tending.”

Marisa squints listening to Uncle Terry, yet not really hearing him at all. The girls shunned her at school and the boys poked fun of her hair, at her ripped backpack, her tennis shoes a size too big. And with her being quiet and meek the teachers simply tolerated her. Why is something like school required when she had her places to live within? her places that took her elsewhere. 

“Hey,” Uncle Terry shifts his weight her way as a peace offering, “you still have those fishing poles?”

Marisa’s face blushes with enthusiasm. “Yup, got them hid away.”

“Well, since school is nearly out for today as it is, why don’t you and me go fishing?”

 Marisa’s eyes light up. She stammers, searching the ground by her feet. “I got to change into my fishin’ clothes.”

“You do that, and I’ll go check in on Telly.”

As he has done one other time before, which now means is the way he is to do it every time from here on out, Uncle Terry attaches the metal handle of the wagon to the undercarriage of his bicycle seat. The red wagon wears spray-painted streaks covering over a patina of rust. Rescued from the dump a few months back, Uncle Terry re-worked both axils to support two sets of bicycle tires.

The contraption sits high and rolls easy along the road. Two fishing poles are wedged between her legs, protruding straight up in the air as one hand holds to the side of the wagon, the other managing the wide brim hat against the wind. Along the bay highway, Uncle Terry rises off his seat to pedal faster, staring back every so often to see Marisa smiling as cars slow to gawk. At the base of a small bridge, the waterhole is a slow-moving spring that deepens in pockets before lazily spilling into the bay. Leaving the contraption in the bushes, they carry the poles and tackle box along a sandy footpath. Marisa grabs Uncle Terry’s hand until reaching a sandy patch where large trees lean and shadows shift in the sunlight.

Uncle Terry lets Marisa roll the balls of bread real tight, then checks each one by compressing them even tighter. He’s a good teacher, showing her how the ball of bread is to be situated on the hook, how to depress the cast button on the reel, how to gently allow the lead weight on the line to do the rest. They sit close to one another, and hands her a pole to manage while he sets bread on the other hook and sends it out. Marisa’s careful to watch the tip of her pole. Stealing glances at Uncle Terry, she sees the way he watches the waters, how his delicate hands hold to the reel in a casual readiness, making his cinnamon-colored skin intoxicating and his quiet intensity serene. He fills her daydreams with travel, and if he had asked her to leave, maybe she would.

 “Mullet are the type of fish who don’t like to be caught,” Uncle Terry says. “There’s a special way in handling something that has no business for hooks.”

“How do you know all ‘bout them Mullets?”

Uncle Terry shrugs. His focus is tremendous, watching the surface of the water, slowly rotating the reel, fingers lithe on the handle, hand relaxed as if his bones measure the subtlety of movement, the tension in the line, the density of water. In his fishing trance voice, he says, “My father taught me when I was about your age.”

“What other things you know?”

As ripples tease the water’s surface, Uncle Terry whispers about the lesson with mullet. “It happens even before the hook snags its mouth. It’s all about the anticipation of the strike, see. You got to know what the fish is thinking and envision him opening its mouth around the breaded ball. And when that happens, that’s the moment the fish is caught.”

It is an unspoken testament shared with watching, then doing many times until the secret is simply known, and now, finally shared.

Uncle Terry violently jerks his pole back, startling Marisa at first, only to have her nerves settle with the fish breaking the surface, flap, then vigorously reeled to shore. Marisa stands and laughs with excitement, staring over the top of Uncle Terry’s shoulder seeing the creature’s gasping gills. She watches the deft maneuvering of his fingers as they efficiently extract the hook from the fish’s mouth.

“Take a look at that!” Uncle Terry bounces the plump fish as if his arm were a scale. “It has some good meat on it. I tell you what, if she feels up to it, get Telly to smear on some of that mustard and cornbread batter. She’ll fry it to a golden brown that is so light, it melts in your mouth like butter. Your grandmother has the best tasting fried mullet that I ever had. It’s making my mouth water just thinking about it.”

Marisa giggles. “It’s making mine water too.”

“Well, this one’s yours. Get her to cook it up for you.”

He dips the small Styrofoam bucket in the creek, drops the fish down inside, and closes the lid. The fray of the moment settles, and Uncle Terry takes up where he was sitting before the fish had popped out of his world and into theirs. Mechanically, he retrieves Marisa’s pole from the sand, slowly reeling it in.

“You’re missing your bread ball,” says Uncle Terry.

“Did the fish eat it?”

“Mullet are sneaky that way…and cold. It didn’t matter one way or the next their brother or sister or even their cousin was in trouble, they wanted the bread, plain and simple.”

Marisa settles beside Uncle Terry. She’s quiet for a minute, then says, “I would have helped my cousin out.”

“You don’t say.”

“Uh-huh, I would. I don’t think I could go off and eat some bread when my cousin was gettin’ caught right next to me.”

Uncle Terry laughs low under his breath as he rips away the crust around the slices of bread and hands Marisa the white middle. “That is why, my dear, you are not a fish.”

“I wouldn’t want to be a fish.”

“Nah, I don’t think you would make a very good fish.”

“Being underwater all the time, it’s got to be very scary at night. Wouldn’t you think it would be scary, Uncle Terry?”

“Yes, of course.”

Biting her bottom lip, Marisa presses the bread balls, and as if uncovering a forgotten language, asks Uncle Terry, “You know what ten plus ten is?”

“Hm, I don’t think I do.”

“Twenty,” she says, punctuating the answer with a proud smile.

“Wow, you certainly know your numbers.”

“And you know what else?”

“What?”

“Twenty plus twenty is forty…”

                                                                                                                              *

For Terry it had always been a strange world seen through strange eyes. His mother died a few years back and left him her home lacking a mortgage. She left her car he kept parked in the garage, (considering he biked everywhere he went), and she left him this void which didn’t seem to be any different than when she was alive. He had walls inside him he could never see around and others that afforded him endless views. He did odd jobs to get by; gardening, cutting grass, handyman type gigs that rich folk seem to lack the time or the inclination to do themselves, but he never took the time to consider this contradiction. He did work and they paid him; a transaction of clean symmetry, and knew he was a character in a play on stage for every scene, yet, never said a thing; so a ghost, yes, he was a ghost just like Marisa’s father, but a ghost for only those who believe in such things.

And now he listens hard as Marisa—sitting and fishing beside her—carry on with the adding of numbers, pushing deeper into the abstract; never anything above fifty, then scaling down to single digits. This is where Uncle Terry sometimes can get lost. Where the years of college courses which never accumulated to a degree, of the periodicals about medicine, science, about physics—read year after year—seem to thoroughly soak into him wholly, making the consumption of ideas resolute.

He listens to Marisa’s words pushing and pushing at the air, the curled formation of her lips enunciating the answers—the numbers expanding her presence—then he watches her small, compacted hands press the bread within her fists, watches the inertia she applies, sees the unseen layer, the thin country which exists in the color of her knuckles becoming lighter on the bone. That the collapsed bread collapses for it is over-powered by the force of Marisa’s hands. He understands the kinetics, the existence of things for the sheer fact they can push back the void and make a space of their own. He understands the six degrees of separation from leaf, to dirt, to Telly laid up in the bed. Then the separation to other people, strangers really, only once or twice removed, yet still tethered close with a wafer-sized separation between them. How the fish in the bucket, caught from the river, will be fried and consumed by the dying woman, become part of her for the fish lacked the ability to overpower the desire for food, the pressure of the hook, the tension of the reel. He knows how the balance is always there upon this thin envelope, where the paradigm shifts without malice or mercy, without the written decree of vengeance or the prophesied order of destiny. It becomes something incredibly simple; things are because they are. That when the numbers Marisa spouts out fail to be remembered, or when Telly can no longer hold onto her breath, when she no longer has the strength to push back the space in the void, the earth will swallow her. It is how it is, a clean, gorgeous equity, and with knowledge like this, how in the world could Uncle Terry have a job at a desk, a confining career, especially at running the risk of losing his soul to a consistency of a paycheck.

The mullet thumps inside the bucket in a brief, delusional fit for freedom, then stills.

“Let me see,” Uncle Terry sets the ovoid bait on the hook and sends the line back out.

“Uncle Terry, guess what?”

“What’s that?”

“I’m gittin’ me a dog that got hit by a car.”

Uncle Terry gives a sidelong glance toward his cousin; heavy wrinkles bracketing his left eye. He’s known Shanoa—Marisa’s mother—a long time, way before Marisa came along and somehow managed to stick in this world. He heard all the stories about Shanoa, or ‘No, as he knows her. How much truth they held he had no business saying, yet he listened in on the family gossip about her dropping out of school, as well as about the men she carried on with. Through the years at Sunday dinners and at funerals he saw how ‘No’s eyes told everything about what this life had given her, about the homes of the rich white people along the bay she cleaned for, with their children sitting idle waiting their turn to sip from the teat of entitlement. Then later, when ‘No got into taking care of the elderly parents for some of the same rich white people on the bay, ‘No wore her bitterness like a winter’s coat. He could sense it was all about the process of caring, the act of, the notion in doing, the emotional undercurrents it involved to be there…constantly, inordinately punctual without complaint. How the minutia of lifting old people with every bit of their dead weight dragging behind because their legs have given up on their bodies, married to the minutia of soiled adult diapers, the baseless commentary when it comes to wiping wrinkled asses, the feeding of wrinkled mouths, the applying of lotion to wrinkled hands. And going home after a day of caring for the old didn’t offer up any relief, for a wrinkled, elderly person named Telly awaited her there. And being that it was ‘No’s own mother made no difference. ‘No was exhausted and her eyes bore the brunt as her tightly drawn lips silently spoke it. The very idea of adding back something else to care for, when the last something else quietly—thank God—died on the porch, is a pill Uncle Terry knew she would be in no mood to swallow.

“Charlie just died a few days ago,” Uncle Terry says, glancing at both fishing lines, “and you’ve already replaced him. Besides, what does your momma have to say about that?”

“She don’t need to say nothin’, I ain’t goin’ to keep it. They just want me to babysit Brown Dog for a while.”

“Brown Dog?”

“That’s the name they gave him, but the woman said I could name it anything I wanted to.”

Uncle Terry grows real still, eyes unblinking, staring at the smooth surface of the water. “Marisa, tighten up on your line.”

“Huh?”

“Reel it in a bit. There you go.” Uncle Terry settles back to easy. “If they are going to let you rename the dog, it doesn’t seem like they’re going to want it back.”

“That’s what they told me, that I can give it a new name. They didn’t say I could keep him, only doggie sit.”

Uncle Terry’s breathes out a laugh like a whistle trying to spit. “We got a good fish today; let’s say we get you back home.”

                                                                                                                              *

The maroon Buick which Telly bought and paid for three years back is parked on the lawn, just as ‘No is parked by the window. Watching Terry guide the contraption to a stop by the front porch steps, she opens the battered screen door and slowly steps out on the porch, holding the door ajar with a few rigid fingers. “Marisa, where have you been? And mind you, I ain’t in no mood for no fibs!”

“Uncle Terry took me fishin’,” Marisa quickly darts across the front porch to a pile of stacked newspapers, sifts out a fresh one, and rushes back to the wagon.

‘No delivers an evil eye toward Uncle Terry and says, “Terry, why did you go off and do somethin’ like that? You know I got to keep that girl in school…”

“…’No, I didn’t mean…”

“…and you comin’ around takin’ her fishin’ when she ought to be in school is not goin’ to keep the county out of my purse. She misses any more school, it’s goin’ to cost me five hundred dollar, not you. And I tell you somethin’ right now, I ain’t goin’ to pay no five hundred dollar. Maybe some of these white folks I clean for can afford five hundred dollar, not me, and besides, you should be off workin’. Don’t you think that’s somethin’ a grown man in his forties should be doin’ with hisself?”

For ‘No, Terry has always been a little off in the head, or different, or not like other people. ‘No saw it the first day of school. They were in the same grade, but it had no bearing on how ‘No treated him; as any embarrassed relative would, she ignored him. And when the social pecking order demanded it, she made fun of him as the others did. She called him names, talked behind his back, stole his homework, and despite these adolescent torments, there seemed to be a bubble that surrounded him. He walked the halls as if no one else mattered, eyes rheumy as if he lived in dreams, and that, coupled with his soft-spoken words and gaunt, wiry frame, Terry didn’t intimidate a soul. Everything he was and did, every word dripped from his lithe little lips, imbued passivity. ‘No never liked him and she never would.

Uncle Terry fusses with the fishing poles. “You’re talking nonsense, ‘No.”

“Is that how it is?”

“I just came by to get the fishing rods. Marisa was already out back. Said that Telly had a coughing fit and stayed home to take care of her.”

‘No’s hip cocks slow to the side; her hand finding the groove of what is left of her waistline. “Marisa, quit messin’ around with that wagon and tell me why you cain’t get on that bus in the mornin’ with the rest of the kids? Why is it I got to be here and wait to see you get on when you know it’ll just make me late for work? Why is it I got to do somethin’ like that?”

Marisa keeps her eyes diverted from her mother’s scrutiny, even away from Uncle Terry, where the fib she told about needing to stay home is written across her pupils because ‘No sees it there herself. Instead, her daughter selectively probes around the inside of a Styrofoam cooler, plucking a fish and carefully setting it down on an open sheet of newspaper. “Look what Uncle Terry gave us to cook tonight.”

“Girl, I don’t give a Tom’s nickel about some fish right now, you get you’re lyin’ ass in here this minute.”

Marisa quickly wraps the paper around the fish, and after tripping up the steps, regains her balance, ducking under her momma’s arm that props the door open.

“Have a nice day, Terry,” says ‘No, turning and following her daughter in the house.

The front door falls heavy with its own weight against the battered frame. From the window, ‘No watches Terry detaching the wagon from the bike, pull it to the side of the house, then pedal out of the yard onto the road. His features—‘No has some of them—yet seeing him go about his business, she barely could make out a negro, or for that matter, even a man. ‘No remembers not one single time him ever bringing a woman around. Never heard stories of dates or unwanted pregnancies, or ‘almost marriages’, or even mildly innocent, partially true rumors of him running around from one bed to the next; only the whispers about him being a ‘queer type’, him setting out altogether differently, pedaling his bike, living with his mother.

“That man has no business here,” ‘No says, turning toward her daughter by the sink. “You got that Marisa! I don’t want him hangin’ around. Or takin’ you off fishin’. Or anything! You got me? Child, what the devil are you goin’ to do with that knife?”

“Gut the fish.”

“Here, give me that!”

‘No takes up the knife, slides the fish over to the counter, pressing her fingers across the spongy thickness of the flesh. Positioning the fish at a diagonal, ‘No rears up with the knife as if to place the tip of the blade in the creature’s anus, and cleanly slice through the belly, but something stops her. The Mullet’s scales become repulsive. The fish is no longer just a fish. It’s a gift, a beguiled token, offered up not in some philanthropic gesture, not in a blind generosity found from kin folk to kin folk, from neighbor to neighbor, now its sinister for the corruption is innocence.

Marisa stands beside ‘No watching her with those large brown eyes. In her daughter, ‘No sees the girl named Shanoa before the baked residue of life abbreviated it, stripped her identity one letter at a time. ‘No stares at herself when she was only a few years older than Marisa, when her teeth didn’t fit right in her own mouth, wearing brown eyes which also stared out quizzically naïve. There, then, yes, she remembers, it’s so close she still can taste the pristine simplicity of childhood on her tongue. Santa Clause existed back then, as did the tooth fairy, Easter bunny, fantasies of marriage to a loving husband, a house she could call her own. At nine years old, her dreams were in color and glowed white on the edges with fanciful thoughts about living in elsewhere places, different than here; maybe a city, maybe something more. For ‘No it was Uncle Fred, it had always been Uncle Fred. His breath that smelled of cigarettes outed in corn liquor, hands rough with calluses, his distended gut heavy on her thin frame. It has been Uncle Fred every day since that first time in the tobacco shed. The other days he did what he felt obliged to do were blurs, but the first time remains.

“Momma, aren’t you gonna to gut the fish?”

‘No lays the knife flat on the counter, takes up the fish and quickly heads toward the back.

“Momma, where you goin’ with that fish?” Marisa’s voice trails behind like an echo.

‘No’s stubbornness pushes her legs on despite her daughters’ unobtrusive tugs against her pants. The stubbornness stuffs her ears closed to the little questioning pleas. Then as ‘No’s stubbornness blindly moves her out the backdoor to the edge of the porch, Marisa’s pleas become shrills of, “Why momma, why?” that end as the mullet is thrown out into the evening light, disappearing into the dark shadows of the overgrown bush.

“I don’t want one goddamn thang from that man, you got that!” ‘No quickly marches past Marisa. “Come inside, Marisa. Now!” For a moment, she stares at her daughter’s backside standing near the edge of the weather-beaten planks, shoulders a little slumped, a little cockeyed. Marisa stares out where the unseen fish was swallowed. Tree frogs bleep and chirp at the horizon as the day washes out. The mother and daughter are quiet as if they have forgotten the necessity of language.

Cagey Williams Smith's alter ego holds an MFA, grants and writing sabbaticals to the Parisian countryside. The reality, Cagey took the old school route as a writer: devoting time overseas, as well as finding an understanding partner who can tolerate the adventurous whims of having ten different jobs. Cagey's stories have appeared in a visual art montage called Spirits of the Dead, New Author’s Journal(For Poetry), Double Dealer(Breeding In Stockholm), The Wisconsin Review(Fish Fry), and in the fall, (The Victim, The Criminal) will be published in Seems edition #54, and in Tribes, (In The Belly Of The Fish). Other pieces have been shortlisted at Glimmer Train and at Faulkner Word and Music Festival, to include second runner up for the novella, Breeding in Stockholm. Now residing in New Orleans, it’s all about happy hours, biking through the French Quarter, and during hurricane season, nervously watching the sky.