The Mirror Thief(127)

Stanley crouches between them, watching the surf. A couple of slender silver fish—maybe six inches long—swim in the backwash of the last wave, there for an instant, then gone. Hey, Stanley whispers. What’re we looking for?

Stuart squints at the ocean, his heavy features fierce and alert. Fish, he says.

Another silver fish zips through the shallows, furrowing the water with its smooth back. Stanley looks at Stuart, then at Milton. What do we do when we see ’em? he says.

Catch ’em, Stuart says.

With what? We got nets?

Don’t need nets, Milton says. Just use your hands. You grab ’em, you drop ’em in the bucket. They come right out of the water.

Stuart’s still wearing his purposeful Bomba-the-Jungle-Boy expression, scanning the white foam. Stanley looks past him. Probably twenty or thirty small fish cruise along the water’s edge between here and the stones of the half-finished jetty. Turning north, he spots even more. What are they supposed to look like? he says.

Like big sardines, Milton says. Five, six inches. Skinny and silver. You’ll see a few males at first: those are the scouts. They case the beach, make sure everything’s a-okay. Then the ladies make the scene, to lay the eggs.

Stanley points. Are those the scouts? he says.

Milton and Stuart hunch forward. Each presses a palm to the wet sand, balancing on it, and shades his eyes from the moonlight with the other. In this position they look like a couple of gargoyles, or stone lions. Well, I’ll be damned, Milton says.

Stuart looks over his shoulder. Get ready! he barks. Here they come.

Within minutes the sand swarms with writhing fish. The crowd on the beach rolls their trousercuffs, rushes forward with whoops and cheers; Claudio hits the cold ocean with a gasp, then wades forward to fill his pail with seawater. The first wave that sweeps Stanley’s bare ankles numbs his skin, seizes his shivering body. He can hardly put a foot down without something squirming under it. Saltwater soaks through his bandage, stings his cut. He stoops, clasps slick scales between his stiff blue fingers, lifts and drops his catch into Claudio’s waiting bucket.

More fish sweep in on each wave, flipping and thrashing, burrowing tail-first into the sand. Patches of beach all along the waterline glitter in the moonlight, as if mirrors have shattered there, their shards come to wriggling liquid life. Stuart and his friends splash past, laughing through chattering teeth. Don’t take more than you’ll eat, Milton says. Leave some for the next new moon. Alex has a small fish cradled in his palm, its head clamped in the crook of his thumb; he whispers something to it, then puts it back into the waves.

The buckets fill, and people amble back to the dry sand. Someone’s playing a blues shuffle on the guitar: I wish I was a grunion, swimming in a cold deep sea, she sings. I’d have all you pretty people fishing after me. Stuart chases one of the women through the knee-deep water, trying to slip a fish down her blouse. Charlie has stolen Alex’s shoes and slipped them on; they’re too small for him. He dances on tiptoe, waving his bottle in the air, shaking his hips and bellowing in an unsteady Scottish burr. Iamb trochee! he shouts. Dig my metrical feet, man! They’re longfellows!

Stanley’s half out of breath—from the cold, from the effort of scrambling after the fish, and also from something else: an unfamiliar feeling that’s hard to name. A wakeful amazement. A sad fragile sense of presentness, of moments passing. The low moon breaks through the clouds for a second, and Stanley thinks of the fireball he saw that time in the desert, and how he felt when he saw it. He thinks of The Mirror Thief, too—thinks of it in a way that he used to think of it all the time, but hasn’t really been able to since he made it out here, since he got close to Welles, as if Welles has been blocking it somehow. Now Stanley remembers. There are certain moments that open onto another world, onto the world that Stanley’s sure he belongs in. The book is a map that will take him there, a password that will unfasten the locks.

He walks back onto the beach for a moment and sits. Claudio rests the bucket on the sand and crouches next to him. Stanley? he says. Are you okay? Are you sick?

Stanley looks at him. Then he looks away. He watches the moon multiplied in the water, the silent buildings along the boardwalk. Streetlamps and the lights of oil-derricks have reshaped the inhabited ruin of the waterfront into a maze of shadows, a hidden web that links a set of illuminated stages. Each empty stage glows like a diorama viewed through a peephole, the scene of a cancelled performance, and hints at something that this place once tried to be. Stanley can feel it reverberate around him, as if he’s inside a struck bell. I’m great, he whispers. I’m doing great.

After a while he rises again. By now they’ve crowded Claudio’s pail with as many fish as seems reasonable, but the bucket that Charlie brought is lying nearby, forgotten on the sand, so Stanley picks it up, and he and Claudio fill it too. What will we do with so many? Claudio asks.

We’re gonna eat ’em. Whaddya think, we’re gonna train ’em to do tricks, like in a flea circus?

How will we do this? We have no place to cook.

Leave that to me, kid. I got a place in mind.

The pulsing silver carpet keeps coming, but soon everybody’s done, loaded with all they can carry. Alex and Lyn have become fidgety, eager to get indoors. They dust themselves off and drift toward town, and the crowd follows them, angling first one direction, then another, pausing sometimes for no reason Stanley can see. The stops and starts spook the captured fish; they ping their snouts against the tin sides of the bucket.