Terminal Island

Chapter Ten

FISH HEAD



Henry was in love.

He spent the next few days in a delirium of romance, the island taking on even more fantastical Technicolor hues than before. Everything Henry had been doing by himself, or with his mother—fishing, snorkeling, exploring the town—he now started doing with Christy, and it made all the difference. She brought a fresh perspective, a whole new way of looking at things.

For instance, when Henry was alone he was accustomed to ignoring the pleas of the coin-divers—that group of local kids who loitered under the base of the pier in the afternoons, cadging quarters from tourists. In the company of his mother he might ask for some change to toss, mildly interested in the feeding frenzy it provoked, but otherwise he passed them by.

Christy, however, took evil pleasure in tormenting them. She would fake tossing a coin, like a dog owner pretending to throw a stick, and when the boys were wise to that trick she would toss a bottle cap, or flattened gum, or anything else resembling a coin, so that they dove furiously after these worthless items. When they objected she would harangue them with insults, long strings of the most extreme profanity Henry had ever heard. She didn’t do this out of any real anger, but only as part of the game, and as soon as she had her fill of screaming she would drop the pose like a cheap Halloween mask: “So, what do you want to do next?” After awhile she wore down Henry’s reluctance, so that hectoring the coin-divers became routine sport for both of them.

This backfired the next time Henry took his mother to the pier. When he began insulting the swimmers, she was taken aback.

“Stop that!” she said, appalled. “What in the world are you doing?”

“It’s fun. Everybody does it. Watch: Hey f*ckheads! Why don’t you get a job? See?”

“Don’t do that! That’s rude!”

“No it’s not. I see people here do it all the time; they don’t think of it like that.”

“Well I do.”

“Come on, it’s funny. You should try it. Look: Get lost, you f*cking a*sholes!”

“Henry, don’t!”

As Henry was about to explain, You see? Nobody cares, a grizzled old fisherman from the boat rental concession marched over and said, “Lady, you better get that boy to control his mouth before someone else does. I don’t care how he talks to you at home, but this is a public place, and I don’t take to that kind of language from a child. Boy his age should know better.”

“Yes, sir, I’m sorry,” Vicki said, grabbing Henry by the arm and dragging him away. “I don’t know what’s come over him!”

“What?” Henry protested. “What?”

Sensing that Christy responded well to naughtiness, Henry did all he could to present an image of himself to her as a bad boy, embellishing his personal history to make himself seem reckless and tough. The problem was she tended to call him on these things. If he told her he had shoplifted, she challenged him to steal candy from the drugstore. If he told her he had stolen wallets and purses, she got all excited about robbing the tourists, pointing out likely targets everywhere they went: There’s an easy one! She’s not even looking! Go, go, go!

Christy showed him all the points of interest that were not on the tourist maps, and not necessarily even open to the public. They got chewed out and chased off on several occasions. The last one she took him to was a tiny hole-in-the-wall shop that had no name or any kind of sign out front. It was in a back alley, and Henry would have never noticed it if she didn’t show him where it was.

“I’ve heard there’s something funny about this place,” she whispered. “You need some kind of private membership to go in. I don’t know what it is, but my dad told me never to come here. I think it’s a whorehouse.”

The doorway was dim as a cave, the window draped in black. A huge green dragonfly was trapped inside the window.

“I dare you to go in and catch it,” she said.

“I dare you.”

“I will if you will.”

“Go ahead.”

“You go first.”

Trying to impress her, Henry crept through the doorway and into a tiny foyer. Inside was a second door padded with red leather, and he pushed on through to a dingy white-tiled room. It was chilly inside, lit with buzzing fluorescents. In the back was a refrigerated display case full of meat. Several spindly café tables and chairs stood against the walls, and at one table sat two emaciated old women, frozen mid-spoonful to stare at Henry. Trying to ignore them, he hurriedly pushed aside the heavy window curtain.

There it was against the glass, the biggest dragonfly he had ever seen, perfect and still as a metallic green toy. Normally Henry had no fear of bugs, but this was an unusually large specimen, and he didn’t quite know how to take hold of it. He didn’t think it could bite or sting him, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure. He also didn’t want to hurt or kill it by accident. He had never caught a dragonfly with his bare hands before.

As he hesitated, the dragonfly suddenly came to life, its cellophane wings battering between the drapes and the windowpane. Panicking, Henry hesitantly grabbed at the madly-whirring object, almost catching it but then fumbling so that it was loosed in the room. He ran after it, following below as the dragonfly sputtered against the ceiling. With Henry in hot pursuit, it flew over the counter and disappeared through a back doorway.

Shoot, he thought.

Creeping behind the counter, he could see something peculiar beyond that door. Behind a beaded curtain was a large metal tub. There was a naked person lying in the tub face down—Henry could make out waxy legs and callused yellow feet. He couldn’t see the whole body, but he could see bare buttocks and a bowl with something red in it. An array of shiny steel knives was laid out on a tray.

It made him think of all the secrets he had glimpsed in the weird rooms of his grandparents’ hotel; visions into the scary inner workings of the adult world. Henry didn’t know what any of it meant, and didn’t want to know. All he knew—and not for the first time in his life—was that this was someplace he was not supposed to be. Then he heard approaching footsteps.

Backing out as fast as he could, he ran into someone—a bony, unyielding body. Cool fingers pinched his earlobe, their long nails pricking sharply. He looked up.

It was one of the old women, staring walleyed at him out of a face like a withered brown apple.

“What’s your hurry?” she cooed. Before he could react, the woman put her nose in his hair and sniffed deeply. “Mmmm,” she breathed, nibbling at his scalp as if grazing.

The other woman was pressing in on him as well, her claw-like hand caressing his face, her thumb in his mouth. And now Henry could see the figure of the Butcher charging out of the kitchen in his spattered apron. “Hold on, son, I gotcha,” the man called briskly. “I gotcha, hold on.”

Henry dodged like a rabbit, moving faster than he ever had in his life. Without thinking, he spun clear of the women and barreled through the exit.

“Wudja see, wudja see?” Christy pressed eagerly when he darted out. She hadn’t come inside at all.

“Run!” he screamed, and the two of them flew halfway across town in delicious fright.

When they finally ran out of steam, Christy gasped, “What—what happened?”

“Nothing!” Henry said wildly. “It got away!”

“What?”

“The dragonfly!”

“Oh…” She looked closely at the side of his head, reaching out to touch his ear. “You’re bleeding,” she said.



* * *



“I should have known. I should have seen it coming, oh yes.” Henry’s mother paced the cramped hotel room in a huff. “He promised me he was staying open at least until the end of the month. He promised me, and I believed him. That’s what gets me. That gets me every time. Hoo boy, what a dummy I am, getting suckered in by a handsome face. They get you every time.”

Mr. Ragmont was closing the restaurant for the season—he had given her barely two days notice.

“And the worst thing of it is,” she told Henry, “I just put down the first month’s rent on a beautiful little apartment. Just the cutest little bungalow, with flowers on the porch and everything! Now I don’t know how we’re going to afford it if I can’t find another job. That was gonna be my big birthday surprise, honey: a new home by the time you start school. Gosh darn it, I was hoping to surprise you, and now this…”



The same old story: just when things were going good. Henry was scarcely even surprised. Actually they had hung on longer than he expected; he was almost bored with the island. But that wasn’t quite the end of it—he got to see Christy one more time.

Perhaps to make up for leaving Henry’s mother in the lurch, Mr. Ragmont offered to take the two kids on a last little outing: the garbage run.

This involved renting an actual pickup truck and hauling the restaurant’s weekly trash to the dump. If not exactly romantic, it was a slightly more interesting errand than it seemed, because the city dump was halfway around the island, high on a cliff overlooking the sea.

They followed the coast road south of town, past Lover’s Cove and around the point to the seaplane terminal. There the road cut inland and climbed a winding path into brown hills. It was all very scenic, Mr. Ragmont providing running commentary about this highlight and that:

There were the stearite digs of the original Indian inhabitants; the condemned mine-shafts left over from the abortive silver boom of the 1800s; the secret camps of gangsters and rum-runners from the time of Prohibition; trails of pigs, goats and bison left over from the heyday of movie Westerns, when Catalina’s rugged chaparral made a perfect Hollywood backdrop.

Of the last, Mr. Ragmont explained that it was actually a myth that filmmakers brought big game came to the island. Not only a myth, but a deliberate cover-up: The truth was that the islanders themselves had imported all the large animals for purposes of ritual sacrifice.

“No way,” Henry said, smiling uncertainly.

“Oh, yeah,” Nick said casually. “This whole place is drenched in sacrificial blood.”

“Blood, really?”

“Have you ever heard the phrase Natal Satanica—Satan’s birthplace?”

“No.”

“It’s an anagram for Santa Catalina.”

“No way.”

“They worship the Antichrist. You didn’t know that?”

“No.”

“Well…you will. Won’t he, honey?”

Christy laughed, nodding. Henry couldn’t tell if they were putting him on. He thought that Mr. Ragmont was possibly insane.

They arrived at the dump and got out. Helping pitch bags of trash, Henry surveyed the otherworldly setting:

It was a plateau, a wide bulldozed shelf on the side of the mountain, with a spectacular view of sea and coastline, yet covered with smoking, stinking dunes of garbage. Not just household trash—there were also large items of junk, including gutted cars and the interesting wreckage of a small private plane, its numbered white tail jutting into the air. Flocks of gulls screamed in protest at the human intrusion, hovering above in wait.

After the chore was done, the three of them stayed a little longer to stretch their legs before the drive back. Christy’s father had an interest in the pickings: “You never know what you’ll find up here,” he said, poking around with a stick. “Just watch your step: these fires can smolder underground for years, slowly carving out hidden fire-pits that can swallow you up like a pig at a luau.”

Henry and Christy wandered the shallow perimeter of the garbage, looking down the cliff and kicking over bits of stuff. Our last date, Henry thought glumly, perusing the variety of junk. Taking a small box out of his pocket, he handed it to her and said, “Here.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing. Kind of a going-away present.”

Christy opened it up and took out the little toy hula girl that Henry had bought at the drugstore. He showed her how to press the base to make it dance. “Cool,” she said. “Thank you.”

“I thought it looked sort of like you.”

“I like it. I didn’t get you anything, though.”

“That’s okay.”

“You want a kiss?”

“Okay.”

She leaned over and kissed him on the lips. She tasted like bubblegum.

“Thanks,” he said, slightly demented.

They continued walking. There were half-melted manikins like dismembered bodies, brown-stained mattresses resembling murder scenes, and refrigerators like white caskets. There was a dead dog with no eyes, its skin stretched tight and bones sticking through, its teeth bared in a silent snarl.

There was a rusty baby-carriage standing upright amid the pollution, the wind riffling its frilled canopy. It was in a region of thicker trash, but at Christy’s urging Henry made his way out to it, carefully picking each step. The smoke stung his eyes.

As he got nearer, he could see that there was something inside, tucked under a blue flannel blanket. Becoming uncomfortable, he almost turned back, but Christy was waiting and he didn’t want to seem chicken.

A doll, it had to be. He came within a few steps of it and froze.

It was moving. Something was rustling under the blanket, jiggling the whole carriage. He had a glimpse of something bone-white and squirming—something that was alive!

Henry screamed, and the carriage exploded with violent motion, a flurry of battering wings. A panicked seagull erupted like a jack-in-the-box, flapping away.

Henry went limp, feeling his wits slowly return. From behind he could hear Christy laughing hysterically. Very funny, he thought. About to ruefully go back, he cast a parting glance at the carriage and caught his breath.

There was still something in there.

Angry at his heart for thumping, he went right up to the carriage. Yes, something was definitely under the blanket, a life-size baby doll of some kind, close enough to touch. Under the shadow of the canopy he could make out a face swarming with flies.

Just a doll, he thought impatiently, stooping to look close.

“Aaugh,” he croaked, reeling back in horror.

It was not a doll. At first he thought it was some kind of grotesque freak, barely human, with a toad-like face that was all mouth, and eye sockets seething with maggots. It was putrid. Clamped between its jaws was a rubber pacifier. Then Henry realized in disgust exactly what it was.

It was a fish. Just the head of a big fish—a big ugly grouper.

Henry thought he might throw up. The fish head had been propped there in the blankets above a doll’s body as some kind of joke. The question was, was the joke on him? He wouldn’t have been surprised to find that Christy was behind it.

He could hear her now, calling to him all innocently, “What’s the matter? What is it?”

“Nothing,” Henry said, composing himself. If it was her, he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. “Just junk.”