Big Fish (7 page)

His Legendary Legs

H
e was so fast it was said he could ar­rive in a place before setting out to get there. It was not running so much as it was flight, his legs seeming never to touch the ground but move across a current of air. He never asked to race but many asked to race him, and though he tried to dissuade them, a young man's taunts and jibes are not easily sustained. He would end up, invariably, removing his shoes—for he never ran in his shoes—and waiting for his eager counterpart to get ready. Then they were off—or rather, it was over, for there was never any race to speak of. Before the young man who wished so to test his skills against those of my father had even left the starting line, he viewed at the finish the dim figure of the man he had hoped to beat.

In Which He Makes His Move

T
o make a long story not quite so long, well, pretty soon it wasn't enough for him just to see her anymore. He had to get close to her, he had to talk, he had to touch.

He followed her around for a while. He followed her between classes, down the halls, this sort of thing. Brushed against her accidentally. Touched her arm in the cafeteria.

“Excuse me,” he always said.

She got into his brain and drove him crazy. One day he watched her sharpening a pencil. Her soft hands holding the long yellow shaft. He picked up the shavings that fell on the floor and rubbed them between his thumb and forefinger. Then one day he saw her talking to someone he thought he knew. She was smiling in a way he'd never seen her smile before. He watched them talk and laugh for a few minutes, and then his heart fell as he watched her look around, then slowly lean in for a kiss. He almost decided not to pursue her when he saw this, but then he placed the face. It was the guy from the barn, the one who had stolen the old lady's eye. His name was Don Price.

My father's feeling was that if he had defeated him once, he could do it again.

His chance came on the following day. His whole body was about to explode from desire. The blood was tight
against his skin. Somehow he needed to release the pressure.
He saw Sandra in the hallway.

“Sandra,” he said, picking an inopportune moment—she was just entering the ladies' room. “You don't know me. You probably have never even seen me before. But I was wondering—if this is something you would consider, I mean—well, that this Friday night maybe we could go out somewhere together. If you want.”

Not surprisingly, at that precise moment she was feeling the same way he was: her body was about to explode, the blood was tight against her skin, and she needed to release the pressure.

“Well, yes,” she said, without seeming to think much about it. “Friday would be nice,” and just that quickly she disappeared into the ladies' room.

Yes, she said, even though just that morning Don Price had asked her to marry him. She'd almost said yes to that, too, but then something had told her to take a few days to think about it, as though my father had sent his hope on a whisper, and she had heard it.

The Fight

E
dward Bloom was not a fighter. He enjoyed the pleasures of human discourse too much to resort to such a primitive and often painful form of settling disputes. But he could defend himself when forced to, and he was forced to the night he took Sandra Kay Templeton for a drive down the road on Piney Mountain.

Three weeks had passed since their first date, and between then and now many words had passed between Edward and Sandra. They'd gone to a movie together, split a couple of malts, he'd even told her a joke or two. Simply by being who he was—no more, no less—my father was winning my mother's heart. Things were getting serious: when he touched her hand, she blushed. She'd forget the end of sentences she'd begun. It wasn't that she'd fallen in love with my father, yet. But she saw that she
could.

Maybe she had a lot more thinking to do.

This night would be an important part of the whole thinking process. It was the night of The Drive. After a few miles of driving aimlessly they'd find themselves at the end of some country dead-end road, alone in the dark woods, and as the silence surrounded them he would lean toward her and she'd move imperceptibly toward him and they would fall into a kiss. And they were heading that way when in the rearview mirror my father saw a pair of headlights, small at first but getting larger, heading fast down the thin and twisting road on Piney Mountain. Edward didn't know it was Don Price. He only knew it was a car coming up behind them at a dangerous speed, and so he slowed down, the better to make a wise decision if something was to happen.

Suddenly the car was directly behind them, its headlights glaring in the rearview mirror. Edward rolled down his window and motioned the car by, but when he did so it bumped his fender. Sandra gasped, and my father touched her leg with his hand to calm her.

“It's okay,” he said. “Probably some drunk kid.”

“No,” she said. “That's Don.”

And my father understood. Without another word, the situation was clear, just as it would have been one hundred years before in a frontier town out west and Don had met him in the middle of a dusty street, hand on his holster. This was a showdown.

Don's car bumped the fender again, and my father hit the gas. Edward had to prove that if fast was what Don Price wanted, Edward could be fast, and being fast he sped around the next curve, leaving Don Price in the distance behind him.

He was back, though, in just seconds, no longer bumping from behind but side by side now, the two cars taking up the entire road, speeding over hills and turns that would have led weaker hearts to stop, then and there. Don Price edged his car into my father's lane, and my father edged back, the two cars scraping door to door. My father knew he could drive this road as long as he needed to, but he wasn't sure about Don Price, whose face he caught a glimpse of as their cars veered back and forth, reeling from the jouncing. The boy had been drinking, for sure.

My father gave the car one last shot of acceleration, pulled ahead, and turned the wheel abruptly, blocking the road with his car. Don Price braked just feet away, and both men were out of their cars in an instant, eye to eye and only an arm's length away.

“She's mine,” Don Price said.

He was as big as Edward, even bigger around the
shoulders. His father owned a trucking company, where
Don worked summers loading and unloading tractor trailers, and it showed.

“I didn't know that she belonged to anybody,” my father said.

“Well, now you do, farm boy,” Don said.

Don looked at her, still sitting in the car.

“Sandra,” he said.

But she didn't move. She just sat there, thinking.

“We're getting married,” Don said to my father. “I've asked her to marry me, farm boy. Or didn't she tell you?”

“The question is, what did she tell you?”

Don Price didn't say anything, but his breathing came faster and his eyes narrowed, like a bull about to charge.

“I could tear you apart like a paper doll,” he said.

“There's no reason for that,” my father said.

“You better hope there's not,” Don Price said. “As long as Sandy gets in my car. Now.”

“She's not going to be doing that, Don,” my father said.

Don Price laughed.

“Who the hell are you to say?”

“You're drunk, Don,” he said. “I'll drive her down off the mountain, and then if she wants to go with you she can. How about that?”

But this just made Don Price laugh even harder. Even though he remembered what he had seen in the glass of the old lady's eye many weeks ago, Don Price just laughed.

“Thanks for giving me a goddamn choice, farm boy,” he said. “But no thanks.”

And Don Price came at my father with the fury of ten men, but my father had the strength of many more, and they fought for some time, beating each other with their fists. Blood covered both their faces, streaming from their noses and lips, but in the end Don Price fell and did not get up, and my father stood over him, triumphant. Then he placed his opponent's limp and aching body into the back seat of his car, and drove Don Price and my mother off the mountain and back into town. He drove until they arrived at my mother's dorm, and parked in the darkness of the late night, with Don Price still moaning softly in the back.

Neither my mother nor my father spoke for a long time. It was a silence so still one could almost hear the other's thoughts. Then my father said, “He asked you to marry him, Sandy?”

“Yes,” my mother said. “He did.”

“And so what did you tell him?” he asked her.

“I told him that I'd think about it,” she said.

“And?” my father said.

“And I've thought about it,” she said, taking my father's bloody hand in her own.

They fell into a kiss.

On Meeting the In-Laws

A
ccording to my father, my mother's father had no hair anywhere on his body. He owned a farm in the country, where he lived with his wife, bedridden by then for ten years, unable to feed herself or talk, and he rode a great horse, as big as any horse there was, and black, with a spot of white on each of its legs just above the hooves.

He adored my mother. He had told amazing stories about her since she was little, and now that he was old and had lost some of his mind it appeared that he had begun to believe them.

He thought she hung the moon. He actually believed this from time to time. He believed the moon wouldn't have been there but that she'd hung it. He believed the stars were wishes, and that one day they would all come true. For her, his daughter. He had told her this when she was little to make her happy, and now that he was old he believed it, because it made him happy and because he was so very old.

He had not been invited to the wedding. How this could happen is simple: no one had. It was not a wedding as much as it was a legal proceeding at the Auburn courthouse, with strangers as witnesses and a febrile old judge as minister, pronouncing in his drawl, with little bits of white spittle gathering in the corners of his mouth, that from this moment forward you are now man and wife till death do you part et cetera. And thus it was done.

This wasn't going to be easy to explain to Mr. Templeton, but my father wanted to give it a try. He drove up to the gate of the farm, where there was a sign that read
stop blow horn
and by coincidence there, too, was his new wife's father, atop his horse, much bigger than life, suspiciously eyeing the long car, from which his daughter shyly waved. He opened the gate by slipping a piece of wood from a six-inch-wide slit carved into a fence post, and my father drove slowly, so as not to spook the horse.

He drove on up to the house, Mr. Templeton following on horseback. My mother and father were quiet. He looked over at her and smiled.

“There's nothing to worry about,” he said.

“Who's worried?” she said, laughing.

Though neither of them seemed particularly reassured.

“D
ADDY,” SHE SAID UP
at the house, “I want you to meet Edward Bloom. Edward, Seth Templeton. Now y'all shake hands.”

They did.

Mr. Templeton looked at his daughter.

“Why am I doing this?” he said.

“Doing what?”

“Shaking this man's hand?”

“
'Cause he's my husband,” she said. “We got married, Daddy.”

He kept shaking, looking deep into Edward's eyes. Then he laughed. It sounded like the burst from a firecracker.

“Married!” he said, and he walked inside. The newlyweds followed. He brought them a couple of Cokes from the icebox, and they sat down in the living room, where Mr. Templeton stuffed an ivory-stemmed pipe full of black tobacco and lit it, and the room was suddenly overcast with a thin layer of smoke, which hung just above their heads.

“So what's all this about?” he said, sucking away and coughing.

It was a question that seemed difficult to answer, so neither of them said anything. They just smiled. Edward stared at the man's hairless, egglike head, then into his eyes.

“I love your daughter, Mr. Templeton,” my father said. “And I'm going to love her and take care of her for the rest of my life.”

My father had thought of what he was going to say for a long time, and he'd come up with these simple, yet profound, words. He thought they said everything that needed saying, and hoped Mr. Templeton would think so, too.

“Bloom, you say?” Mr. Templeton said, squinting. “Knew a man named Bloom once. Rode with him. 1918, 1919, I was in the cavalry. Stationed in Yellowstone. In those days there were bandits. You may not have realized that. Mexican bandits mostly. Horse thieves and just regular thieves. We chased our share of them, Bloom and me. Along with the others, of course. Rogerson, Mayberry, Stimson. Right into Mexico. Oh yes. Our share. We chased them. Right into Mexico, Mr. Bloom. Right into Mexico.”

My father nodded, smiled, sipped on his Coke. Mr. Templeton hadn't heard a word he said.

“You have a nice-looking horse out there,” my father said.

“You know about horses, then?” he said, and laughed again—popping, gravelly sounds. “You've found a man who knows something about horses, haven't you, dear?”

“I think I have, Daddy,” she said.

“That's good,” he said, nodding. “That's very good.”

The day passed in just this way. Mr. Templeton told stories of his days in the cavalry, and laughed, and the conversation turned to religion and Jesus, a favorite topic of Mr. Templeton's, for it was his belief that the crucifixion was an especially dastardly act, seeing as how Pontius Pilate and Jesus had been roommates at Oxford. In this light Pontius Pilate had really done the Lord dirty. No more mention was made of the marriage the rest of that afternoon—Mr. Templeton, in fact, seemed to forget why they were there at all—and as dusk came on it was time to leave.

The three of them stood, the men shook hands again, and they walked past the closed bedroom door and slowed there. Sandra looked at her father, who shook his head.

“Not a good day,” he said. “Best not disturb her.”

And so they left, the two of them, waving at the old man through the darkening light, and him waving back at them and pointing, with a child's delight, toward the starry sky.