Kon Tikki

2 - Fishing around

2 - Fishing around

Josh Tallgate, descendant of a proud line of Maori warriors, had not often set foot in the mall, except for some pressing needs and bits and pieces of hardware. The owner of the Kon Tikki Bar and Restaurant had to do many errands himself to keep the place afloat in food and booze.

Certainly he had never eaten at the row of fast-food outlets counters, like the Thai with its wasteful boxes of sticky ramen, that a clutch of teenagers seemed to enjoy. He crossed the emptiness of the central plaza, a wide bowl of air four stories high. The distant ceiling bristled with metallic light fixtures like threatening porcupine spines. Among those spines, hidden loudspeakers dripped a sappy Musak tune that diverged far from the original Cry Me a River original.

The opening day at his restaurant had been a whirl wind of visitors and officials and cooking, and their food reserve had dwindled to almost nothing in mere hours. Josh had come at the new mall to find a food provider closer to his restaurant.

Josh stepped with his empty bags inside the Safe Harbor Fresh Food Mart, next to the Divine Authentic Thai Experience. A moody ballad from a pop singer echoed in the mid-sized store. From where Josh stood, near the open sliding glass door, the moody ballad clashed horribly with the sappy Musak falling from the plaza’s hedgehog ceiling.

The fishes on display at the sea food counter were indifferent to the ugly mix; a spotted bass stared at his shaved head with glazed eyes, as if they had seen too much. The other fishes on the bed of plastic grass looked oversized to him, injected with growth hormones or whatever the fish farms used to get them twice the size of their species in the wild. In reverse, the “captured in the wild” salmon was smaller than the specimens his old restaurant had served. Maybe there were less of them left, with all the net-dragging methods of fishing that scraped the floor.

Josh bent over the counter, breathing in the fish smell, with a tinge of salt. He looked for signs of deterioration linked to storage, like dun scales, or fibrous branchia. The glass-eyed fishes glistened as if some oil had been applied on the scales.

The clerk from the Safe Harbor Fresh Food, his complexion also oily, looked at his thick leather watch. He was probably not used to a customer spending more than four seconds poring over the goods.

“So, you takin’ some fish or not? I’m closing soon,” he said.

A pale-skinned clerk, no more than sixteen if Josh was a good judge of ages, was pushing the fruit and veggies stalls across the sliding door threshold.

Josh turned his attention to the glassy-eyed bass, the pale undersized salmon. He would have to drive soon next morning to the next town, maybe even try the fish markets of Portland to find the kind of fish he wanted. Even in a tourist district, he wanted the best for his clients.

He shook his head and turned away from the counter.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” he said.

His grandfather, still living in the New Zealand, had developed an intimacy with the sea and its creatures, instilling in the small Joshua a love and reverence for the great ocean. And a sure taste for the cooking of seafood. When his dad had migrated to the new World, the boy had been disappointed by the lack of natural, accessible coasts. He had been more disappointed with the lack of fresh fishes. Those in displays didn’t taste real.

He would need more fish since the grand opening affluence had drained his reserves. As he was exiting the grocery, his sensitive ears caught a stray snippet of conversation over the background music.

“Did we show that fag, or didn’t we, hey boys?”

The talker was a teenager in frayed jeans who had tried to achieve a Crocodile Dundee look and failed. The leather vest was just too slick-looking despite the grease stains. His hair was a half-inch fuzz covering his skull that suggested a GI Joe attempt. He and his similarly inspired buddies were destroying boxes of ramen at the Divine Authentic Thai Experience, laughing and chattering between themselves, sharing some private joke.

But it was one word, fag, that made the hair on his arms bristle.

Josh had left New York city, where the Pride parade was a genuine festival and only some pockets of resistance had not gotten the rainbow-colored memo.

Here, in this town closer to the ocean, he felt he had become an exception, again. But the seated boys were not looking at him, engrossed in their food and smacking their lips. They looked like idle lazy bums who would splash dark paint over beautiful murals, just for the sake of defiling it.

Josh listened in, nevertheless.

It had been a survival reflex at school in the Island, before his dad swept him and his mom to the States. It had been a survival reflex as well in the bad neighborhood where they lived, as his dad work inhuman hours while waiting for his green card, and his mom cleaned two-story houses in the affluent district (always under the fear of being sent back to the Island). Then the word fag faded out from the public discourse, as the LBGT letters rose to prominence, later followed by the Q+, at the same time his parents achieved their own dream. Josh’s dad never ceased to remind him how lucky he was to be naturalized.

Josh had graduated from the Culinary Institute with honors, worked ungodly hours in restaurants, before opening his own place in the Big Apple. It had been the best days of his life, inviting his aging pair of parents to his big opening…

A burst of raucous laughter erupted from the tiny table, so loud that the brown-uniformed security guard eating at the Coffee Place two fast-food joints from the Thai rose from his counter stool and started ambling in their direction.

The fuzz-haired youngster with the Crocodile Dundee vest saw the old man in uniform coming their way and whispered to his buddies.

The three youngsters rose from their plastic chairs and swaggered across the plaza towards the doors, leaving flattened boxes behind, some ramen wriggling out like tiny worms in the hot sauce dripping from the upended containers. The tension drained from Josh, but he followed the trio with wary eyes.

He had witnessed the same close-cropped style in counter-demonstrations where born-again fanatics allied with worthless thugs tried to disrupt the Pride Parade. He had seen such closed-cropped head bunched in front of a coffee place or restaurant popular in the gay crowd.

Josh started to pick his own way around the stools and lost packages to get out, leaving a distance between him and the young men. Passing under one harsh spotlight from the bristled ceiling, they looked older than ide teenagers. Their pale skin colored golden by the yellow sign with the hefty, confident-looking worker on it. The Tool Barn would be closed by now; however, the idle youngsters elbowing themselves and sniggering, their heads swiveling to look inside. Maybe casting the place for something to steal, Josh thought.

Then the trio passed beyond the double doors of the mall into the night, leaving their mystery behind. Josh inched closer to the great front windows on his way to the double doors. He slowed down to an easy amble, wondering what could have been so interesting inside the store. The big overhead halogen lamps had been shut down; only the light from the plaza’s weird ceiling entered the store.

There was enough of it to make out the chest-high shelves with small tools hanging on tringles, the paint station, some boxes of mid-sized appliances, all straight alleys leading to the back…

From the corner of his eyes, he caught a movement.

Josh froze, one foot lifted. There big sliding door of the Tool Barn was closed. He checked the big horloge over the double glass doors: the Barn had closed more than thirty minutes ago. Nobody should be there.

Putting his bags down, he leaned against the glass, peering inside. Then he saw it.

The hair on his arms and nape bristled, like a mini ceiling. Over the appliances boxes, a head with lanky gray hair was hovering, seven or eight feet up.

In an instant, Josh remembered all the ghosts stories his grand dad had told him. A shiver ran through his spine, that had nothing to do with the abusive air conditioning of the place. His heart stammered, in readiness to run from a danger.

The head was moving, jerking this and that way, the horrid hair strands trailing along. Josh could see no face, only the hair in the gloomy light. Moving, swaying, along the dripping musak. He could make out a slim neck swaying along, the body hidden by two coffin-sized cardboard boxes. He felt sweat forming over his scalp.

Almost crashing his nose against the glass, Josh observed the rotation of the head. It was jerking, up and down, the move constrained by a narrow opening over the coffin-sized box.

He wondered if the headless youngsters had seen the ghost, too. If the head made them laugh.

As soon as this question had formed in his head, his rational self came bravely forward. The trio had not seen a ghost. As his eyes accustomed to the penumbra, the hair strands became a mop head, the neck a handle. The jerkiness had a weird human touch in it.

A terrified, helpless human.