Chapter 5: Two Fish Ears

Two Fish Ears

The popsicle had been cherry when he bought it. Three blocks later it was a wet pink stick, and his right hand was sticky to the wrist, so he carried it along with him like a man with important business at a trash can and no idea where the nearest one was.

His left hand stayed in his pocket. It had been in there all morning. Under his knuckles was the wad of paper he had not thrown out yet, worked down now to the size and roughly the shape of a walnut.

He went east, past the laundromat and the pawn shop, and took his time about it, because there was nothing in the day he had to get to before four o’clock and that suited him. Somebody’s dog barked at him from behind a fence and he barked back. A woman on a stoop watched him do it. He nodded to her. She went inside.

At the corner of the square there was an old stone church with the doors propped open, and inside, a choir was running through something for the noon service. The sound came out onto the street in one long clean line, no hurry in it at all, the way water sounds when there’s plenty of it.

His phone went off three times in a row.

[Hollis] The Ladder.
[Hollis] You brought it up in my car and then changed the subject like a coward, so I made some calls anyway.
[Hollis] One of the sponsors is Harrow Group.

[Quin] Great. Rich people.

[Hollis] Anybody who gets to the filmed round gets paid. Real money. Third place is six figures.
[Hollis] Win it and they sign the whole band to ZIA and put you on the main stage at three festivals.
[Hollis] Which is what you used to have, in case you forgot.

Quin switched the stick to his other hand, thought about it, and typed with one thumb.

[Quin] There’s a show like this every spring. They die in the second round and everybody goes back to their jobs.

[Hollis] Not this one.
[Hollis] My cousin runs two clubs. Marcus. He signed one of them over as a venue for the qualifiers.
[Hollis] The Bellwether. Where you played your first show.

Quin stood at the bottom of the church steps and looked at that for a second.

[Quin] Tell Marcus his green room floor still sticks to shoes.

[Hollis] Tell him yourself.

[Quin] You’ve got a guy with a club in every city. What is that, a hobby?

[Hollis] It’s called having friends. Try it.

[Hollis] Somebody’s going to cover one of your songs on that stage. I’d bet the shop on it.

[Quin] They’d better have their paperwork in order. I’ll have my lawyer send a cease-and-desist by Friday.

[Hollis] They’re your songs, you asshole.

He had sent the joke without thinking about it. A year ago a line like that out of Hollis would have ended the day early, blinds down, phone in the drawer. Now he could stand on a sidewalk and make a joke about his own catalog and put the phone away and keep walking.

The choir went up a step, all together, and the square got quiet around it.

Quin looked at the open doors for a while. Then he walked the stick down to a trash can at the corner, an errand that took longer than it should have, and came back and lay down. Just like that, on his back on the warm stone, the sun full on his face.

People went around him. A woman in scrubs stopped and asked if he wanted her to call somebody. Two teenagers across the street filmed him, probably. A man came by pushing a cart with a broom and a dustpan hanging off it, stopped, and stood over him with both hands on the cart.

“Buddy. Hey. Buddy. You all right?”

Quin kept his eyes shut and shouted it up at the sky like a man singing across a valley.

“I’m fine! Don’t worry about me! I’m just crazy!”

The broom fell off the cart and hit the pavement with a flat bang. The man picked it up without a word and got going, faster than before, and did not look back at him once.

For a second he was on the roof of his old high school, the same sun coming down on him, nobody inside the building knowing where he was.

Then the phone buzzed against his hip, and the roof was gone, and he was a grown man lying on church steps. He knew before he looked.

[Hollis] Be careful with the kid.
[Hollis] A guy stands outside your door more than once, it’s not for your personality.
[Hollis] You’ve got a name on you. A fanbase, a reputation, a search history. Even if he loses, the show gets the story, and the story is you.

The typing bubble came up under the message and stayed up.

Hollis hadn’t wanted to put it that way. But he’d watched it happen to Quin once already, and he wasn’t going to sit on the end of a phone and watch it happen again.

That had landed, then. Any second now the long one would come back, taking the kid apart, taking the show apart, funny about all of it, and Hollis would read it twice.

The bubble stopped. Came up again. Stopped.

[Quin] Yeah. You’re right. Big deal.

He put the phone face down on his chest and lay there another minute in the sun.

The studio was two rooms over a dry cleaner, and there were three people on the payroll: the woman at the front desk who ran the schedule, Wes Boyle, who owned the place and taught violin in the big room, and Quin.

He couldn’t sit in a room with adults for an hour without wanting to go out a window. He’d tried it for years. The little ones were fine. The little ones never asked what he used to do.

Five minutes to the end of the last class, Ruby shut her book and swung her feet off the piano bench and asked him.

“Mr. Fish? When I grow up I want to be in a band. Do you think I could?”

Band. He’d had the word from Hollis at noon, standing on the church steps, and now he was getting it out of a kid’s mouth.

He didn’t answer. She leaned over and tugged at his sleeve.

“Mr. Fish? Did you hear me?”

“I heard you. Both ears.”

“Fish don’t have ears.”

“Right,” he said, and swallowed the no the way he swallowed most things, and got the smile up, and patted the top of her head with two fingers. “A band. When you grow up, make some money first.”

“Why?”

“Because bands cost money.”

“How do you know?”

“You’ll find out when you’re older.”

“Want to know the three things I hate most?”

She thought about it. “Yeah.”

He put up one hand. Anybody else would have started on the index finger. He started on the middle one, straight up, dead serious.

“One. Singing.”

Then the index.

“Two. Contests.”

Then the ring finger.

“Three. Kids who talk too much.”

She went quiet. Then her face did the thing where the cheeks go red first and the chin goes last, and then she cried.

He found the box of tissues and did what he could with it, which was not much. She kept going. So he tipped his head back and cried too, at the top of his lungs, a full performance, with the tissues balled up in his fist, and about eight seconds in she stopped dead and stared at him, and that was the end of it.

Downstairs, a cart was set up at the curb selling fruit on sticks dipped in chocolate — strawberries, a banana cut into coins, three marshmallows, and one green grape sitting on the very top like a hat.

He bought one and held it out to her.

“Thank you, Mr. Fish!” She got both hands around the stick and pulled. He didn’t let go.

“Who said you get the whole thing? Take the one off the top.”

“That’s the grape.”

“I don’t like grapes.”

“Mr. Fish.”

“Take it or leave it.”

She took it. She put the grape in her mouth and ate it in one bite and stood there holding the rest of the skewer in her fist like a torch, furious. He bit a strawberry off the middle of it while they walked to the door.

“You are the worst teacher,” she said.

“I know. Meanest one in the state. They did a study.”

He hadn’t planned on being called Fish.

He’d come back in the spring with one bag and a mood that made the days long, and walking was something to do with them. He walked the loop road from the east side to the west side, four miles of it, because he had the time and didn’t have anywhere better, and partway around he got hungry and went into a diner with the windows steamed up and took the last stool at the counter.

The man on the next stool was on the phone, saying into it that he needed somebody to teach theory to little kids. Kids, not teenagers, not adults. And not, apparently, for very much.

When the call ended, Quin hooked a thumb at his own chest.

“Would I do?”

He could have given the man a name. A name came with everything behind it, and there wasn’t enough money in this for that.

“Fish,” he said.

He had wanted Big Fish. It came out FISH on the whiteboard in blue marker, and then the kids made it Mr. Fish, and then the parents picked it up, and then the woman at the front desk, and by June he had stopped correcting anybody.

Ruby’s mother came at a quarter past five, keys already out.

“Mr. Fish!” Ruby turned at the door, hanging off her mother’s hand. “If you went on a singing show you’d win and get so much money.”

“I don’t do contests.”

“You’d be rich. You could buy all the candy in the store.”

“I said I don’t do them.”

“You sing all the time,” she said, and her mother pulled her through the door and it shut on the rest of it.

He stood on the step a second longer than he needed to.

Then he got his bag and went to the bus stop. Hollis in the morning, Ruby at the door — twice in one day, from two people who had nothing to do with each other, both of them pushing him back at the same word. He rode with his head against the glass, all the way across the city, one hand closed around the wad of paper in his coat pocket that he still had not thrown out.