Big Fish (8 page)

His Three Labors

B
ecause it was a great metropolis full of hope, my parents moved to Birm­ingham, Alabama, where my father sought his fortune. Word of his great strength, intelligence, and perseverance had spread even this far, and yet his youth was such that my father knew he must perform many great labors before he assumed his rightful place.

His first labor was to work as a veterinarian's assistant. As a veterinarian's assistant, his most important responsibility was to clean out the dog kennels and cat cages. Every morning when he arrived, the cages and kennels would be nearly filled with feces. Some of it would lie on the paper he'd placed down the night before, but still more would be smeared on the walls, and some of it on the very animals themselves. My father cleaned this mess up every morning and every evening. He did it until the cages shone, until you could have eaten a meal off the surface of the floor, so spotless and clean had he left it. But it would only take a few seconds for it to get soiled again, and this was the job's terrible Sisyphean frustration: a dog might look straight at you, just as you were locking him into his lovely, newly cleaned cage, and shit.

H
IS SECOND LABOR WAS
as a sales clerk in the lingerie section of a department store downtown, called Smith's. The fact that he had been stationed in lingerie seemed a cruel joke, and indeed, he suffered greatly from the sassy comments he heard from the men in other departments—especially from the men in sportswear. But he persevered, and eventually won the trust of the women who regularly shopped at Smith's, and in fact came to be preferred to the women who worked with him. They valued his keen eye.

But there was one woman who was never able to accept my father as a sales clerk. Her name was Muriel Rainwater. She had lived in Birmingham all her life, had two husbands, both dead, no children at all, and money beyond counting to get through before she passed on herself. She was almost eighty years old then, and, much like a tree, each year had seen her girth expand until she'd become monumental; still, she was quite vain. While she didn't care to be much thinner than she was, she certainly wanted to look much thinner, and thus often visited the lingerie department at Smith's searching for the latest in girdles.

And so every month Mrs. Rainwater marched down to Smith's and sat down in one of the large, overstuffed chairs
provided for its customers, and, without a word, merely
nodded toward a clerk, and that clerk duly brought her the latest in girdle wear. But that clerk was never Edward Bloom.

This was clearly a snub. But the truth was that Edward was not particularly fond of Mrs. Rainwater, either. No one was—the way her feet smelled of moth balls, her hair like burnt fabric, and the way her arms shook when she pointed at something she wanted. But the fact that she insisted on not allowing him to serve her made her, to Edward, the most desirable customer in the store. He made it his goal to one day wait on Muriel Rainwater.

To this end he pirated the next shipment of girdles and hid them in a corner of the warehouse, where only he could find them. Mrs. Rainwater came in the very next day. She sat down in an overstuffed chair and pointed at one of the girls.

“You!” she said. “Bring me the girdle!”

The girl grew flustered, for she feared Mrs. Rainwater.

“The girdle?” she said. “But none have arrived!”

“Oh yes they have!” Mrs. Rainwater said, her mouth wide and gaping like a cave. “I know they have arrived! You!” she said, pointing to another, her arm sloshing like a water balloon. “If she can't serve me, you can. Bring me the girdle!”

This girl ran crying from the floor. The next girl fell to her knees before Mrs. Rainwater even said a word.

Finally, no one was left to point at but my father. He stood at the far end of the showroom floor, tall and proud. She saw him, but pretended not to. She pretended he wasn't there at all.

“Can someone please help me?” she screamed. “I want to see the new girdle! Can someone please—”

My father crossed the showroom floor and stood before her.

“What do you want?” she said.

“Here to serve you, Mrs. Rainwater.”

Mrs. Rainwater shook her head and stared at her feet; she looked like she wanted to spit.

“Men don't belong in this department!” she cried.

“And yet,” he said, “here I am. And I alone know where the new girdles are. I alone can help you.”

“No!” she said, shaking her head in disbelief, her big horse eyes plainly shocked. “This can't be . . . I, I—”

“I'd be happy to get it for you, Mrs. Rainwater. More than happy.”

“Fine then!” she said, little bits of spittle collecting at the corners of her mouth. “Get me the girdle!”

And so he did. Mrs. Rainwater stood. She waddled to the changing room, where the girdle rested on a stool. She slammed the door behind her. My father heard her grunt and groan and snap and tighten and finally, some minutes later, she emerged.

And she was no longer Mrs. Rainwater. She had been completely transformed. The girdle had taken her, this whale of a woman, and turned her into beauty itself. She did have a bounteous breast, and a rear end of some proportion, but her figure was all wavy and smooth rolls, and she even seemed younger, and sweeter, and certainly a happier woman than before. It was indeed a technological miracle.

She looked at my father as though he were a god.

“This is it!” she cried, her voice a melodious tune. “This is the girdle I've been waiting for all my life! And to think that you—you—I've been so unfair! Can you ever forgive me?”

Then she turned from him and faced a mirror, where she enthusiastically admired her new self.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Oh my, yes. This is how I was meant to look. With this, I can probably get a new husband. I never thought girdles could come so far so quickly! But look at me! Just look!”

She turned and gave my father an adoring glance.

“You'll go far here, young man,” she said.

T
HE THIRD AND LAST
labor Edward Bloom
performed had to do with a wild dog. After being speedily promoted from sales clerk to manager, my mother and father moved into a small white house across the street from the elementary school. They were only the second family to live in that house. It had been built by Amos Calloway, sixty years before, and he and his wife had raised a family there,
and the children had all moved away. Mrs. Calloway had died many years before, and when Mr. Calloway died, everyone in the neighborhood assumed one of their lovely children would move back there to live. But they didn't. The children had their own lives rooted in distant towns and cities, and, after burying their father, promptly put the house on the market, which the Blooms felt lucky to have snatched up.

But the Blooms weren't welcome—not in Amos Calloway's house. Amos Calloway's association with the house he built was so strong that following his death, some in the neighborhood suggested that the structure be razed and a park built for the children there. Now that the Calloways had departed, maybe the house should go, too. For some strange new couple to come in and live there was like—it was like two people trying to squeeze into Amos Calloway's coffin, his own body just freshly placed there. In short, nobody much liked the Blooms.

My mother and father did what they could to change this. My mother took in stray cats, just as she learned Mrs. Calloway had done. My father continued to trim the frontage azaleas into the shapes of the alphabet, something Amos was locally famous for. All for nothing. On weekends my mother and father worked out in the yard, just as their neighbors did, but it was as if they were invisible. And in a way, they were. In order to bear the absence of Amos Cal­loway and his family, the neighborhood had chosen to disregard the Blooms' presence.

Until there came a day when the neighborhood was invaded by a pack of wild dogs. Who knows where they came from. Six, eight, some say ten—they tore through the trash cans at night, and dug deep holes in the gardens. The velvety canvas of sleep was torn by their terrible howls and vicious snarls. Other dogs who dared to face them were found dead the next morning, or never found at all. Children were not allowed outside past dusk, and some of the men took to carrying guns with them everywhere they went. Finally, the town called in officials from the State Bureau of Animal Control, and on one bloody night all the wild dogs were either killed or captured.

All but one, that is. And he was the fiercest, most terrible dog of all. Pitch black, he blended with the night. It was said he was so stealthy you wouldn't know he was even near you—until he showed you his bright shining teeth. And this dog was not merely wild: he was a crazed, lunatic dog, with a seeming human capacity for rage and retribution. One family paid dearly when they installed an electric fence around their property. Watching out the window one night they saw the dog walk into it. He was shocked and thrown back into the street, but essentially unharmed. After that the dog toured the edge of this family's property almost exclusively, with the effect that, through the night at least, no one came in and no went out. It was as though, instead of pro­tection, the family had built a prison for themselves.

At any time in his life, my father could have tamed the dog and led him back into the hills from whence he came; such was his way with animals. And yet he didn't. Why? Be­cause for once, he couldn't. The rigors of his new life had weakened him. It wasn't a reluctance to use the strengths and
powers he was born with; he simply didn't seem to possess
them anymore.

And the marauding would have continued if Fate had
n't nudged my father in the small of his back, urging him to leave the house one night and take a walk. The streets of Edgewood were empty, of course: who dared brave these streets after the sun had gone down, knowing, as they did, that the Helldog (as he'd come to be known) was out there, somewhere? My father thought little of the dog, however; he wasn't the kind of man who structured his life around a
canine peril. Or perhaps my father was the agent of some
greater power. All we know for certain is this: he went for a walk one night and saved a child's life.

The child—three-year-old Jennifer Morgan, who lived
just two doors down from the old Calloway place, as it was still called—had wandered out the kitchen door while her parents were working to unclog a toilet in the master bedroom. She'd heard so much about the dog outside that she could no longer resist: she had to go out and pet him. When my father saw her, she was walking toward the feral black presence with a piece of bread in her hand, calling, “Here doggy. Doggy, come here.”

The Helldog was coming at a leisurely gait, unable to believe his luck. He had never eaten a little girl before, but he'd heard they were tasty. Better than little boys, anyway, and almost as good as chickens.

The culinary ecstasy of the moment was interrupted, however, by Edward Bloom. He scooped the girl up in his arms and tossed the bread to the dog, who ignored it and kept coming. At any other time his fabled power with the animals would have beguiled the dog into docility. However, the big black Helldog was aggravated. Edward had rudely come between him and a meal.

The dog came at them in a fury and jumped. Holding t
he girl in one arm, Bloom reached out with the other and grabbed the dog by his neck, then slammed him to the ground. The dog yelped, but got back on all fours and growled with a frightful seriousness. His head swung from side
to side with a dizzying speed; for a moment he looked as if he had two heads, growling and baring two sets of teeth and pink-white gums.

By this time, the Morgans had noticed their little girl was missing and had come running in the direction of the dog's terrible howl. They arrived in time to see the dog lunge once more, this time barely missing my father's neck, his warm moist breath spraying past. This was the dog's fatal mistake: leaving his bare underside exposed as he jumped so high into the air, Edward Bloom was able to thrust his hand through the dog's hair and skin and into the body proper, clutching and finally ripping out his massive beating heart. My father held the girl so close, nestled into his wide shoulder, that she was spared this last gory scene. As the dog fell heavy to the ground my father dropped the heart there also, and handed the girl to her parents, and continued his walk into the night.

Thus ended the three labors of Edward Bloom.

He Goes to War

H
e wasn't a general, or a captain, or an officer of any kind. He wasn't the medic, he wasn't the poet, he wasn't the cynic, he wasn't the lover, and he wasn't the radio operator. He was, of course, a sailor. Across the foamy sea he rolled with hundreds of others, aboard an invulnerable vessel called the
Neried
. This was a ship as big as his hometown—bigger, even. Certainly, there were more people aboard the
Neried
than lived within
the city limits of Ashland, though he had put a great distance
between himself and that town. Since leaving, he had accomplished many great things, and now he was accomplishing the greatest of all: defending the free world. He felt, in an odd way, that the world rested on his shoulders. That, even though he was merely a sailor, without even a medal, without decoration of any kind, somehow the entire effort hinged on his ability to see it through. It was good to be a part of this crew, then, on this invulnerable ship, slipping through the wine-dark sea. Being surrounded by water, by horizons everywhere he looked, made him consider the greater world lying beyond, and the possibility that the world held out to him. Being surrounded by water made him feel secure and at peace.

This is how he was feeling when a torpedo ripped into the hull. The ship felt like it had run aground, and Edward was thrown four feet across the deck. The ship began to list.

“All hands on deck!” the loudspeaker boomed. “Blow up your life belts!”

My father, a part of him in shock, thinking
This isn't supposed to happen,
found his life belt and tied one of the cords around his neck and the other around his waist. He looked around him, annoyed,
This isn't supposed to happen,
but far from panic. No one around him panicked, either. Everyone was amazingly cool, as if this were a drill. But the
Neried
was listing to port.

The captain's voice came through then on the loudspeaker.

“All hands on deck. Prepare to abandon ship.”

Still there was no alarm, no hurry. Those on the flag deck moved toward a companionway leading to the quarterdeck. There was no pushing. Edward smiled at his friends, and they smiled back, even though the ship they were on was going down.

On deck he saw the extent of his new reality. Men were tossing rafts overboard as well as pieces of wood, life belts, benches, anything that would float. Then they jumped into sea after them. But the ship was like a series of ledges. Many misjudged the distance, hit the side of the ship, and slid into the sea. Everywhere men were flinging themselves into the water. Hundreds of heads, like human buoys, were bobbing in the water. The propeller was still turning, and
some of the men were sucked into its turning blades. Edward
sat down on the edge of the ship and removed the last letter he had received from his wife. “Not a day goes by that I don't think of you. I even pray—just started. Feels good. Hope it helps some.” He smiled, refolded the letter, and placed it back in his pocket. He took off his shoes and his socks, and he rolled each sock up in a ball and placed them in the toes of his shoes. He watched as a man near him jumped off the ship and onto another man, and both disappeared
. I don't want to jump on anybody,
he thought, and looked for an open spot. But down below the sea was cov
ered in a sheet of oil, and he didn't want to jump into that,
either. So he looked until he found a clear circle of water, a place the oil had yet to saturate, and he pretended to believe he could jump from the side of the ship straight into it.

Miraculously, he did. He jumped the twenty feet from the side of the ship directly into that spot of sea, where he sank fast, and didn't rise. He remained suspended thirty, maybe even forty feet below the surface, like a fly in amber. He could see the ship sinking to one side, and above him hundreds and hundreds of legs of his fellow sailors, like a great giant centipede swimming in the sea. He felt as though he should be drowning by then, but he wasn't. In fact, he seemed to be breathing. Not through his mouth but through his own body. He didn't understand it but he was breathing, and he thought this meant he was dead.

But then, in the distance away from the ship, he saw a young girl waving to him. The same girl, he remembered, from a long time ago, he knew that in a minute. She was waving him toward her, smiling, as though she'd been waiting on him there for some time. He began to swim toward her. Same girl all right. A little older now, as he was. But the same girl. As he got closer she swam out farther, and kept waving. He didn't know how long he was under water like that, swimming toward her, but it was longer than it should have been. He swam until a shaft of sunlight broke through the oil-shrouded sea and he looked up to see there was no oil there, just pure blue. And then he looked for the girl—
young lady,
he corrected himself—but she was gone, too. And all of a sudden he was in need of a breath of fresh air. So he moved toward the surface sunlight, suddenly as light and fast as a bubble himself, and when he popped into the bright world saw how far away he was from everyone. They were treading water, moving slowly through the oil. But they saw Edward waving to them as the girl had waved to him, and it gave them a sense of purpose, even hope, and those who saw him began to swim toward my father as fast as they possibly could. Hundreds of men moved sluggishly through the oil toward him. Some didn't, though. Even some who saw him didn't move. And these were the men who were sucked back under when the
Neried
finally went down. Even as far out as Edward was, he felt the futile tug of the ship on his body, pulling him back. But he wasn't going back. He was going home.