Traveling Fish 09/06

The other night I rode my bike back to my brothers house. I am housesitting a big house and it is about a 5 minute ride from my brothers. You go down a street, turn right, follow that street for a while and then it turns into a dirt road with big chunky gravel(rocks) and there is a small bridge across a fat creek and then down pass many trees and through many puddles and out into a neighborhood . Around a next corner and there his house is. Along the part with all the trees are many different kind of frogs going at it. They all have different voices. Some sound like a creak in a water pump. When I first heard them I thought that’s what I was listening to. Diane assured me they were frogs. After a particularly long and very wet rain bull frogs come out. You go around that bend where the puddles and trees are and it sounds like a group of cello's tuning up. It's erie and beautiful in the steamy dark night. Riding this road at night is one of my favorite things to do.
On the way back along the paved street part I saw what looked like a wiggling fat leaf. I rode over to it and thought it was an almost formed frog. An almost finished pollywog. It wiggled and wiggled making very slow progress . And then i realized it wasn't a frog. It was a fish. A fat spikey fish, about the size of a fat mouse. I carefully picked it up and looked around. There were a few shallow puddles but no streams in sight. It was just traveling alone. It was so spikey and hard and round. I stood there and watched it gulp for whatever it is fish are gulping for. Water? Its spikes were sharp and who knew, little spiky street walking fish may be poisonous. I found a storm drain and tossed it in.
Agrippa thought it came from the sky. ...or maybe some fisherman walking back and tossing what he didn't want. but that would be strange to do at 11:45 at night. Fishermen go to bed early. Just about everyone goes to bed early in this town of 8 million.

That night I got up to go to the bathroom and heard a heavy flicking sound in the corner of the room. a shadow , the size of mouse..not a fat one though, hit the curtain and thudded upon the floor. I turned on the light and found a very fat large beetle stuck belly up on the floor whapping his useless wings making a thick whirring sound. I picked it up with a plastic bag. Before I tossed it out the window I showed it to Agrippa who had no real interest and just said sleepily, “You like bugs.”
I do.
In the morning I went down to take a swim in the pool. There was a dead bat on the tiles under the palm palapa. Agrippa came down and said, “There’s another one. Its near that pillow. Your pillows are getting dirty out here.”
Two dead bats? I took a stick and pushed it over. It was covered in frenetic ants. Bats are so ...beautiful, so petite, such exquisite diaphinous wings. I stared at it for a long time.
“Do you like bats too?” asked Agrippa.
“Yes.”
“There’s another one Pauly, you are going to step on it.”
There was another one. And then another and another. 5 dead bats. One was stuck into the bamboo rafters up in the palapa. Its little butt sticking out from the thatching like a cartoon.
“Oh.” I dawned. “Its because i left the fan on last night.”
When I had come back from my night ride I saw I had left the palapa fan on and turned it off. Poor bats. They had all got whacked by the fan propeller. I went to get a plastic bag to fill up with bats. I came back and Agrippa said, “This one is alive, be careful.” It began loudly squeaking over and over. It sounded like a squeaky toy being abused to provoke attention. It was so loud for such a tiny creature. The little guy looked directly at me. His wing was broken and he was furiously trying to get the ants off of him and licking his wing where it had broke. Agrippa unceremoniously began to sweep up all the bats and was trying to sweep up the little guy too but I stopped him. I went and got a mop handle to lift him up out of the ants.
“You can’t save him. That bat is going to die.”
“I don’t know what to do with him. Maybe you should kill him?”
“No. Just stick it outside and let it die.”
It hung tremulously on my mop handle rod and I opened the big iron gates and posted it against the wall in some shade. I looked at the pitiful bat and said to it quietly, “I’m sorry but your going to die.”

I came back in clanging the big gate closed. I picked up the feather pillows I had thrown out in the rain a while back.
I had bought these pillows in China. After all my stays in hotel rooms , nice ones, I got to thinking that the main thing that a good hotel room had that I didn’t have, were down pillows. In Ho Chi Minh I had looked to buy some but found that they were like $100.00 for a dang pillow. Wow. In the hotel room book they had listed the price of the pillows as being about $8.00. I excitedly went down to the front desk and said I would like to buy two pillows but the guy said that that list had been updated and they were actually about $50.00 each. Oh. I said with disappointment. He pointed to a big department store across the wide street. Once there I found a row of bedding booths and soon had all the shop keepers attention. In China, they can’t seem to believe that you can’t speak their language. I was continually approached and given little, what I thought must be, promotional speeches by store clerks. Half the time I would just shrug, smile and walk away. Sometimes I would garble back at them and we would stand there looking blankly at one another. The clerk would usually inexplicably try again. Sometimes I would walk away and they would follow behind me getting in the last garble.
But pictures are worth a thousand languages so I drew a picture of a feather and showed it to this sales girl. I was shown a packaged pillow. $30.00. I walked down the way armed with my picture of a feather to find the best price. But there were no other feather pillows. As I walked back the salesgirl approached me and pulled me back to the pillow. I knew and they knew, they had the only feather pillows in the store. But now the price was $10.00. Apparently I had been shrewdly bargaining for the only feather pillows in the place without even realizing it. So I bought two. I thought I might have some problems going in and out of customs with new feather pillows but I didn’t. On my last trip I had come home with two whole smoked ducks. They had been gifts from a vendor. He noted that I liked duck so he bought me one and then added in a bonus duck at the last minute. Either I had not looked pleased enough or I had looked too pleased with the first one.
When I brought the pillows home I realized they were filled with low grade feathers not down. I also realized they smelled strongly of chicken shit. So during one torrential rain I threw them off the balcony into the storm to give them a good soaking. Even after about 10 rain storms and equal amounts of torrid scalding heat , they still smelled badly. One day I ripped out a seam and poured a half bottle of cheap shampoo into each of them. I then spent at least 3 hours trying to rinse a billion soapy feathers off through 2 tightly woven pillow cases. This did the trick.


Anyway, that day I brought the pillows inside. I got dressed and Agrippa drove me to town on his bike and took off for soccer training. I went to the bank. I asked the teller if there were little fish that could walk in Vietnam. She said no , there were not.
“But last night,” I said, “I found a little spiky fish wiggling down the road at 11:30 pm. He was very round and spiky. About the size of a fat mouse.” She was shaking her head the whole time firmly implanting the word “no” between every few shakes.
I had an instant of wanting to grab her head and stop it from shaking. I was always annoyed at that bank. In Vietnam they don’t really do checks. I tried to cash a check and they said it would take a month and there would be a fee that was 35% of the actual checks worth. “That’s crazy!” I snarled. My boyfriend wasn’t allowed to deposit cash into my account. “Why?Why not?? That doesn’t make any sense at all!, I snapped. They wouldn’t accept my $100 dollar bill because it had creases down the middle of it. To this I pulled out a 10,000 dong note that looked like it had been used as toilet paper for half of this town’s 8 million people and shook it between my finger tips at her. “Oh! Oh! I see, but this money is fine?!”, I cried bugging my eyes and craning my neck forward the better for her to see WTF written on my forehead.

When I came home the bat was gone and so was the mop handle. I should have known better than to put that mop handle outside. Now I would have to find the mop handle store and that could be difficult. No one was going to understand why I would be showing them a drawing of a mop handle, making a show of looking far and wide into the distances, shrugging my shoulders and then just standing there staring at them with a look of expectancy.