Away with the Fishes Read online

  Also by Stephanie Siciarz

  Left at the Mango Tree

  PINK MOON PRESS

  Away with the Fishes

  Stephanie Siciarz

  Copyright © 2014 Stephanie Siciarz

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Art: Patti Schermerhorn

  Cover Design: Andrew C Bly

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the express permission of the author. This includes reprints, excerpts, photocopying, recording, or any future means of reproducing text.

  Published in the United States by Pink Moon Press

  ISBN: 0989686329

  ISBN-13: 9780989686327

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014909553

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Again,

  for Barry

  *

  Honest man, early 40s, athletic, with fishing boat seeks honest woman, early 30s, with bicycle, cooking skills, and dainty hands. For immediate marriage.

  *

  On Oh I was known as a sea captain, though I wasn’t one at all. Captain Dagmore, they called me. Captain Dagmore Bowles. I’ve never commanded on ship or shore, and I prefer a grand piano to a grand sailing vessel. But I have traveled the seas, plumbed their very depths, if you must know, and I consider myself a not-so-accidental expert on the islands that dot the water’s surface.

  An island worth its salt, I’ve always said, is like a well-composed sonata. I ought to know, for I’ve navigated the tricky terrain of more than one of each. Wind is meter, I say, to which the palms and pawpaws have to bend; tides and toads, flats and sharps that should never stray too far out of key; and the sea and sand, the staff upon which all the notes are splashed. I assure you that if ever an island was worth its salt—a bit too salty even—that is the island of Oh.

  In fact, this is as much Oh’s story as it is my own, for my life didn’t simply unravel against the island’s backdrop. It didn’t dance methodically across the stage of Oh’s sands or recite its poetry to an audience of coco palms. No, indeed. Rather, it was the island theater that dictated the actors’ steps and mine. Its sun and its moon who at whim—as always—entangle the cords of the poor islander marionettes.

  I lived on Oh not once but twice. And not anymore. I don’t live anywhere anymore. I, the once Captain Dagmore Bowles, don’t live at all, not in the manner of a moving, breathing man who plays piano or stretches his toes in the soft, gritty sand. I’m no longer a son, or a father. Not in the way I once was. I simply am. I float on Oh’s shores. I walk on its winds. I watch the goings-on, the view so much better from where I am now.

  When the island sits quiet, the odd (very odd) uneventful day on Oh, I return to the beach that made me the man I once was, haunt the house that broke my heart, or sit atop the rocky peak that stole so many blissful hours from me. I could go somewhere new, I suppose, but why bother? Oh decided long ago that I (and mine) belong to her, to her mangoes and manchineels, her pineapples and prickly pear, and, above all, to her inconstant moon and her chilly sun.

  Oh, the devilish undoings of that heavenly twosome! If ever you should come here, beware. Not just of your friends and your enemies (assuming you can tell which is which); be wary, too, of the sun and the moon, who spin around your head.

  1

  Stories on Oh are not of the kind that can simply be told from start to finish, like gliding through the alphabet, each letter cozily tucked between the ones before and after. The island’s tales, they shift with the wind, and destinies turn on a teacup. My story is a case in point. It starts not with me, but with Bruce Kandele—editor-in-chief, copyeditor, reporter, and special correspondent of Oh’s only newspaper, the Morning Crier.

  Bruce was vexed that, of late, the best he could do in the line of front-page news was an unusually sumptuous sunset or a plum pair of rainbows. Though he enjoyed a good sunset as much as you or I—a good rainbow, too—sunsets and rainbows were not the Morning Crier’s usual fare, and putting them on the front page had Bruce’s dander up. Oh’s trim daily typically fed on lean and meaty truth, not on natural wonders, too sweet to nourish and far too everyday to stir the palate. Now if, in the bronze and salmon hues of the setting sun, a crime had been committed, some infraction infracted or conspiracy conspired; if, under the colorful arcs that graced the sky in twos and threes like ripples in a pool, a theft took place, or a ruse; then perhaps. But pretty pictures for pretty pictures’ sake were not going to sell a paper, and Bruce knew this very well.

  Trouble was that for the first time in the history of the Morning Crier (which goes back three generations, maybe four), nothing was going on. Not a mystery, a calamity, a family feud. Usually given to melodrama, Oh had grown tedious. The island simply endured, its chorus of trees and scheming moon, its fickle tides and shifty winds, all as if asleep. Worse than that, their dull and sleepy communion shunned the islanders. Shut them out, it did, like goats on the wrong side of a fence.

  The hummingbirds minded their business. The mosquitoes didn’t bite. Even the leaves kept to themselves, singing their rustling hymns in the most hushed of voices. Anywhere else, this would be the order of the day. But not on Oh. On Oh, the clouds cook up trouble. The stars spice up our stew. Sun and moon, as I told you, take turns playing roles in our islander tragicomedies. Bruce couldn’t remember anything like it, and neither could I.

  Bruce feared the island’s silence to be the calm before an especially vicious (if front-page-worthy) proverbial storm. At night he studied the heavens. When would the dratted storm break? he asked them. And with what force? He checked the positions of the planets and the stars, examined the different hues that made up the nighttime sky, but he couldn’t spot a single sign to ease his apprehensions, couldn’t glimpse the slightest hint that whatever was stewing would be served up before long.

  Part of Bruce’s interest in the island’s brooding mood was economic. If the best he could put on the paper’s front page was a pair of galloping rainbows, the paper was sure to go broke. Equal part
of his interest ran much, much deeper than that. Like the rest of the islanders, he was bored, bored and a little bit worried. How long would they tolerate an island so aloof? he wondered. What might happen if they tired, finally, of Oh’s taunts and its moping about? What might the bored and a-little-bit-worried islanders be capable of if their fancies weren’t tickled—and soon?

  Bruce Kandele was not the only one who felt the way he did, though few others on Oh would have elaborated their position as eloquently (he was a journalist, after all). They would only have said that lately things seemed a bit “feeble,” as if the island were dozing, or a little bit drunk on rum and juice. Take, for example, Trevor Rouge, owner and operator of the island’s most popular bakery, and generally acknowledged good and jolly guy.

  Trevor, after entering the world plump and promising, had grown into a man some six inches shorter than he would have liked to be. He made up for his stature (or lack thereof) with a tall-ish crocheted cap that housed his hair, with a razor-sharp wit, and a strong and admirable heart. Together they garnered him the immediate friendship and unwavering respect of everyone he encountered, and made of his bakery a sort of meeting place, a town hall dusted in flour where one was assured of warm company and warm buns, “old talk” (island gossip), and cheap cold drinks from a fridge that rocked and hummed.

  Presiding as he did over the bakery court, Trevor often found himself in the midst of the islanders’ muddles, a position about which Trevor’s wife, Patience Rouge, had mixed feelings. Though she enjoyed the money and custom that his advice and company lured into the bakery, and liked very much to hear the island gossip he brought home, she thought it unwise of Trevor to get mixed up in the islanders’ troubles. Trouble on Oh was infectious and Patience feared equally for her own health and his.

  Ever-present at Trevor’s Bakery, besides Trevor himself, was Branson Bowles. Doctor Branson Bowles, to be precise. (Branson was once my son.) He taught history at the Boys’ School of Oh, the same school where Trevor and he had studied history and mathematics and literature. Rather, he had studied those things, while Trevor played cricket and rendezvoused with the girls and somehow in the end knew just as much as Branson did (though Branson is taller and bulkier, with no need to stuff big hair inside a big hat).

  Trevor and Branson had been as close as brothers in their boy days. They still were, though Branson’s time abroad, eight long years for his teacher’s training, left him feeling more an outsider than an islander. Time off an island will do that to you, take it from me. Without Trevor’s conspiring and enthusiastic ear, Branson’s experiences far from Oh were mostly insipid, and it was with great joy that he had returned—over fifteen years ago now—to take up his post at the Boys’ School, and his place at the edge of Trevor’s bakery counter at the end of every day.

  Like most of the islanders, Officer Raoul Orlean, Head of Customs and Excise, made the occasional stop at Trevor’s Bakery, too, though his reasons for doing so were strictly professional. Raoul didn’t go in search of fritters or friends, but to sniff out facts and clues. He had a soft spot for what he called truths of the plain-as-noses-on-faces variety (as opposed to island magic), and more than once he had caught whiff of one at Trevor’s. His nose and his forty-odd years in the service of the island’s imports and exports had propelled him to the Office’s top rank (he started out a mere stamper of passports at the airport), and pushed him to the verge of retirement dozens of times. Though he threatened to leave his job on a weekly basis, the case had yet to come up that would send him packing. He cursed every time a tough one arose, then didn’t sleep until he had solved it, each recovered tariff and levied fine a matter of personal and patriotic pride.

  Bruce, on the other hand, checked in at the bakery at least once a day. He knew, as Raoul did, that the bakery was a hotbed of information and buns both, and unlike Raoul, whose wife Ms. Lila cooked up all a man could ask for, Bruce had an equal need for newsworthy gossip and pineapple cake.

  Around the time that Bruce feared for what Oh had (or worse, maybe didn’t have) in store, he was not, as I said, the only one to sense the island’s troubles. Trevor and his customers did, too—with the exception of Raoul, who found it rather refreshing that the mosquitoes had stopped stinging and that the islanders had stopped discerning impossible whispers in the shimmy of the trees. While Bruce fretted and pleaded with the lazy stars, and while all the bakery’s patrons but Raoul talked of little else, Trevor, on the other hand, knew that nothing any of them said or did (or didn’t say or do) could hasten the island’s pace. He had spent his whole life on Oh, every single second of it minus those he spent swimming in the sea; he knew that the island would come around when it wanted—and not a minute before.

  Trevor knew the island so well, in fact, that he perceived the exact moment when Oh’s tantrum was about to end. He announced it at the bakery one late, cloudy night, over hot bread, ginger beer, and a pair of lonely hearts. Front-page lonely hearts.

  2

  “Oho!” Trevor snorted as he banged his hand on the bakery counter. “Now who do you suppose wrote that?!” He had just finished reading aloud, for the tenth time that day, the unusual (and already infamous) ad of the lovelorn man in the Morning Crier, the one with the fishing boat and seeking a bicycled bride who could cook.

  “He put it in an envelope with money and slipped it under the door,” Bruce announced. “I don’t have any idea who it was.”

  “But the front page, Bruce? Couldn’t you bury it somewhere inside the paper?” Branson asked.

  “It’s better than a sunset,” he rebutted. “I thought it might give us all something to do. You know, we figure out who this fellow is and then we help him find a dainty-handed mate on two wheels. Preferably with a basket of macaroni pie dangling off the handlebars.”

  Branson didn’t insist, for Bruce was loath ever to admit any error in journalistic judgment. Imagine his conviction when it appeared he had solved both of his problems in one fell swoop: the islanders were buying up the paper faster than Bruce could print it and they could talk of nothing else. The lonely fisherman had become an instant local hero. As the customers filed through the bakery for their daily bread, they elevated him to near-saint status. A hard worker! A strong and decent young man! One of Oh’s finest, who sought nothing more than a dainty and capable woman with whom to go fish, to go forth and to multiply! (They never did figure where the bicycle fit in.) That such a man should be reduced to advertising his basic needs was a tragedy! A travesty! A testimony to the malevolence of every woman on Oh who would let such a catch bob sad, ignored, and unhitched in the gentle sea!

  Raoul, who, generally speaking, didn’t give a flying fish about lonely hearts ads, quietly took in the scene, paying particular attention to what Bruce had to say. Though Bruce and Raoul weren’t the closest of friends, they went back a long way, and Raoul consulted with Bruce on cases once in a while. When he heard Bruce mention the envelope surreptitiously slipped under the door, Raoul pricked up his ears. He, too, had found a strange, unsigned message that day, and it was precisely because of it that he had stopped in the bakery to sniff for clues. Was some anonymous island troublemaker on the loose? And what did he mean dragging Raoul into whatever he was up to?

  But by the time the evening drew to a close, Raoul had convinced himself that Bruce’s anonymous ad had nothing to do with Raoul’s own mysterious communication, for which there simply must be some perfectly reasonable—and plain—explanation. He wouldn’t give it another thought.

  And yet.

  Like a gnat, the strange message flitted inside Raoul’s head, and he could focus on little else. He nodded distractedly to Bruce as Bruce left. He listened to, but didn’t hear, the wave of talk that swelled and engulfed the bakery, finally splashing Trevor’s customers out into the empty street. Through the glass of the storefront, it looked to Raoul as if they floated off into the dark, clinging eerily to their plump and plastic-wrapped loaves like castaways to buoys.

  He had a
very bad feeling that the gnat in his brain was about to become a fat and proper fly.

  3

  A gnat on the brain was nothing new for Raoul Orlean. His problems always whizzed about his head like so many winged insects, the severity of each tribulation directly proportional to the size of the fly that denoted it. At any given time, Raoul was plagued by a flurry of critters representing his daily obligations: a fruitfly for the phone bill he had to pay at Oh-Tel, a midge for the letter of reprimand to a subordinate found drunk at his post, a whole dozen of gnats for the eggs his wife asked him to pick up at the market. There were houseflies (the kitchen windowframe in need of repair) and gardenflies (a rat that had his way with Ms. Lila’s melons). There were craneflies, blowflies, and bottleflies in blue and green. This day’s fly, though—this Tuesday fly that turned up at the bakery—was unusual even for Raoul. It was a shocking, mocking shade of hot pink.

  To start, Tuesday was supposed to be Raoul’s day off. He spent every one of them at the Pritchard T. Lullo Public Library, under the watchful eye of his librarian wife, relishing the plain-as-noses-on-faces truths the library shelves housed. Only the most demanding of Customs cases or the most imperative of personal chores could force Raoul to skip his weekly visit. What kept him from his books on this Tuesday was a diplomatic affair, one of utmost importance. His wife, for weeks, had been pestering him to repaint their chipped and flaking cottage, and marital tensions had risen to the point of stand-off. Ms. Lila had flat out refused to prepare Raoul’s breakfast until he started the task at hand. To emphasize her point, she had laid his place at the table that morning with brushes and scrapers and paint thinner, in lieu of his typical Tuesday coffee and oatmeal and milk. She instructed her husband to settle for a quick cup of tea and to get to work. The cottage, though expansive, was short and single-storied, and if he put his mind to it, she said as she dashed off to the library, he might get a first coat on all the way round.