The Coral Fish

by Anthony Spaeth

Though I was sitting in a truck with a dog between my shoes, I saw a pale blue coral fish swimming through the water upside down. Its body was long. There were gaps between its scales. And I tried to remember if it was something I had seen or something I had dreamt.

Samford and I had spent the previous night in a small motel on the outskirts of Puerto Limon. The room was stark; it had three beds, two windows, and a lamp. And I remember, when I woke in the midmorning, covered in sweat, that I looked out the window nearest me. A man stood there, chopping weeds with a gray machete, and three vultures were resting in the shadow of a fence. In the courtyard of the motel, I saw the proprietress' daughter pinning bleached bedsheets to a line. I watched her closely. She was lean and black and there were sweat marks on her pits.

The shower came in one cold stream; I stood outside it, lathering my soap. And watched through the barred bathroom window as laborers raised the wooden frame of a new, two-story home -- I could sit and watch it being built and wonder if it would ever be complete, or if one day it would be abandoned like others had been. Everything around the house was green and succulent. In the distance I could see the sea. The rusted frame of an ancient tanker was grounded in the shallows there and children were balling themselves up and splashing from its bow.

A wave of brightness passed across the bathroom wall and when I turned around I saw Samford standing in the doorjamb with a bottle in his hands. His figure was backlit by the streaming light which came in through the courtyard door. And I had a strange picture of myself there, standing naked in the bathroom above the naked drain, my narrow body covered in soap, holding the bar against my belly, my beard and my hair still dry. He saw me staring at the bottle and he held it out to me. The liquid inside was clear and thin. The lower half of the bottle was wrapped in straw. "Have some cat juice," he said, smiling. When I shook my head, he shrugged his shoulders and closed the door again.

The two of us drove south from Limon, following a telephone line that ran along the highway. On our right, the coastal ridge rose up so steeply from the plain that the trunks of the lower trees blended with the trunks of those at higher elevations and the forest on the mountainside seemed a thousand feet high, no mountainside at all. When we crossed a wooden bridge I looked to my left, past Samford, and saw the tea-colored waters of a river emptying into the sea. It looked almost like blood. I looked for crocodiles. And then I began to see the coral fish. It swam before me upside down. Its eye was broad, intelligent, and startled. And I watched it disappear into the darker water. The last thing that I saw was its tail waving back and forth.

I had let my window down. Beneath my feet, the floorboard was growing warm from the transmission. The retriever was staring up at me, squinting its eyes against the wind that came in through the windows, and I stared back at him. Samford jerked the truck from lane to lane, dodging potholes in the vacant highway.

A Swiss couple had built a series of bungalows along the seaside and, as we passed them, the tiny yellow buildings stood out from the forest. Just as the last one disappeared behind us, Samford eased his truck onto the shoulder of the highway and turned down the drive of a small tienda. I saw the shop. It was made of cinder blocks and pieces of sheet metal painted like the sky. The proprietress and her son were sitting on the porch, their elbows resting on the rail, their faces brown dots at a distance. Without moving, without changing their blank expressions, they watched as we approached and then stepped down from the truck. The dog dipped his head out and I pushed it back again, shaking my finger.

As we walked toward the store, the woman coughed into her hand and I looked at her face closely, saw the creases there, the blackened lines, her swollen neck, and I decided it was better not to eat. I looked over her shoulder, all her dusty goods resting on the shelves, and asked for an orange drink; Samford ordered rice and an Imperial. As the proprietress brought them, I watched to see that she didn't touch my bottle's mouth, though I didn't say a thing to Samford.

We sat down at a table on the porch and Samford waved his open hand disgustedly, mumbling something something "Fuck this May." I looked up. I looked around: the sky above was overcast, as it always was at noon. The bungalows were visible through the foliage in the distance, yellow shapes and rooftops standing out. A grayish mould was growing in the folds of my shirt. And below my feet, the tile floor was wet in streaks and smelled strongly of ammonia.

Samford said, "Keep an eye out, Tom. The telephone lines are down somewhere between here and Punta Uva."

I nodded my head.

We sat for a while. I watched him eat. And watched a purple crab as it crept sideways across the tile and paused near the legs of our table; it stood tall and flexed its claws at me. I sipped my drink. I wanted to reach down and bait it with the napkin from my bottle, but before I could Samford had stamped in its direction. At the sound, the proprietress' head jerked up as if she had been sleeping. And I watched as she walked over, lifting her broom -- with one quick gesture, she swept the crab through the spindles of the railing and into the forest. For a moment I found that I was still watching that crab fly through the air. Seeing it again. Imaging its flight through its senses, spinning slowly in the warm air while the trees rushed by. The highway and the yellow buildings. Then Samford caught me staring.

"What will you do when you find the pole?" I asked him.

"Nothing. Mark it down." He shrugged and shook his head, then raised his upturned hands and said, "Drive back to Limon and call it in. They'll be a crew here in a couple weeks."

I said, "A couple weeks."

We sat there quietly again, I was looking at the trees for an iguana or perhaps a sloth, until finally Samford, who was not a quiet man, poked me in the ribs and pointed to the ashcan. I turned my head. There. The plastic head of a tampon applicator was half-buried in the cigarettes and sand. I watched as Samford looked at it and then looked over his shoulder at the old woman, as if to say that he found it hard to believe that she was still menstruating. I didn't laugh. But I thought that perhaps the woman had meant it as an advertisement, a demonstration that she was not sterile and that she could still have another husband or another lover. And I wondered how it had gotten there, exactly. Had she put the tampon in while sitting on the porch? I pictured that, in a chair with her skirt drawn up, though the picture did not disturb or entertain me. I stared at the boy. He saw where I had looked and after a while he got up and walked away.

I stared at the dog, which was panting out the window of the truck. I stared at a Tico walking along the side of the highway with a long machete looped in his belt. I pulled the front of my shirt out flat before me and stared at the mould, which grew in horizontal lines that corresponded with the creases.

Samford set his bottle on the table, then put some coins down beside it and, without a word or gesture, started walking toward the truck. I followed him, picturing his face, swollen and creased from drinking and yet there was still something handsome there beneath it. He had a broad good chin, a heavy brow. He had the kind of clear crow-footed eyes that other men can envy.

As we pulled out from the store, I watched him closely. The cuffs of his shirt were rolled back along his forearms and I saw the muscles above his wrists go tense, serially, as if he'd drummed his fingers. His elbows straightened. He pressed his palms against the steering wheel and I heard his shoulder pop. Then he cocked his neck and stared at himself in the mirror, studying his eyes. And then he shook his head.

"So," he said to me.

"What?" I said.

"Do you still want that carpet?"

I shrugged my shoulders and pointed through the windshield. The downed telephone pole lay there by the roadside with its concrete root upended. There was a gravel bed in the crater and the soil around it was damp and red, full of clay and nearly lifeless. With my eyes still hooded, I said, "Marcie does. Marcie wants the carpet."

He drove the truck across the shallow gully and into the grass, then jammed the transmission into park. I watched him, waited for him to ask me to accompany him, waited for his door to close, and then got out myself.

The telephone pole had fallen across a hilltop and, as Samford knelt by it, shaking the ball-bearing in a can of orange paint, I looked out over the sea.

"What's she going to do with it?" he asked me.

"Put it on the floor," I said.

He painted numbers down the side of the pole and painted them again, more broadly, on the grass. He sprayed a crooked line across the highway and drew an arrow on the end, one that pointed to the pole. His face was flushed from bending over and loose skin hung beneath his eyes. He took a pad and pencil from his breast pocket and squatted near the cross spar of the pole, copying something from the metal cylinder attached there. His finger ran along the cylinder; he transcribed a few characters; he ran his finger on the cylinder again.

He was kneeling by the pole. The wind was blowing. From the hilltop I could see the sea and the high mark of the tide. There were fallen tree trunks on the beach. I imagined myself standing there, in the translucent water between the shoreline and the reef. The cuffs of my pants were rolled up on my shins; my fingers were pinching my pantslegs, holding them at the knees. A pale blue coral fish swam by me upside down. I stopped to look at it. Its mouth was small and pursed. Its broad eye seemed confused and that confusion, to me, implied intelligence -- as if seeing in this new inverted way made things which had been understood suddenly difficult to comprehend.

I could see its pectoral fins. I could see its thin white belly. I reached down with my hand. One of my pantslegs dropped into the surf and I felt my cuff, wet and abrasive, around my ankle. In this dream, I could have sworn I should have touched the fish, but my eyesight must have been distorted by the water, because I didn't reach it, I only watched it swim away.