I WAS WALKING in the garden when I saw it lying there on the pebbly ground. It was a quarter of a fish, neatly cut through on both sides. The cuts were fresh, and the flesh was still pink. The fish had a clean smell to it. I wasn’t sure what kind it was, maybe salmon, maybe trout. I’m not a fisherman like Murphy is. Stooping down, I examined the fish. Maybe it had fallen out of someone’s shopping bag? A likely story. The likeliest. A few paces away though there was another piece of fresh fish. This time it was a fish’s head. This piece had been severed at the gills. The fish’s eyes were intact, staring up at the gray skies. Thunder rumbled.
I walked along through the garden. I could see the hedge in the distance, and there was a fountain in the center. As I was walking, I heard a few thuds up ahead. There were more pieces of fish that had landed. What was going on? I surveyed the horizon, and could see small pieces of fish dropping from the clouds. How could it be? Maybe it happened sometimes, if there was a storm or squall. The storm might just draw up anything it could get its hands, or clouds on, into the heavens, and then release them somewhere else, like this English garden right here.
There were other things dropping. Bones. There was a nearly intact human skeleton up ahead. It was wearing an old-fashioned three-cornered hat, the kind you might find on a captain in the Golden Age of Piracy. At the house, some relatives had already begun to inspect one of these skeletal precipitations. “Look at its fingers,” a girl said. “This is an old skeleton. This was probably plucked out of a graveyard. That’s probably what happened. A great waterspout!”
Maybe it was. Maybe the clouds had absorbed a lake, complete with fish and a submerged cemetery. Now they were releasing the pieces in our garden. It was tea time by then, and we sat around on the terrace drinking a hot cup of tea. Two of my cousins were trying to piece together different bones like they were forensic scientists. One arm led to a torso. This leg attached to this pelvis. Some of the fingers had silver rings. What were we to do with the fish?
Maybe we should just fry them up on the spot?
I REMEMBERED AT THIS MOMENT that I had a gig up in Walnut Creek. Just me and my guitar. Riken, the lanky Japanese mountaineer and naturalist, had entered the house, a palatial English manor home, and I was telling him about the fish and the skeletons. He said there had to be some reasonable atmospheric explanation for everything. “It happens all the time that fish and pirate skeletons drop from the sky,” he said. I told him I was worried about the gig, he told me not to worry. “Just wing it. Play them some blues. Something from the Son House songbook.”
I loaded up my car and started the long drive north to the gig. Along the way, I stopped at my girlfriend’s house. Francesca wasn’t there, but all of her Italian cousins were, and her Uncle Rudy was also there. My car was filthy, and I began to quickly wipe down the dashboard as Uncle Rudy came over to examine it. “Mazda,” is all he said, with his thick eyebrows arching up. He looked like that old actor, Chaz Palminteri. He was even wearing a black polo shirt and, yes, a gold chain, but the chain wasn’t too big or too gold. Various Italian cousins were marching back and forth in front of the house, like those kids in The Sound of Music. “Francesca is out,” Uncle Rudy said. “I just wanted to say hi,” I said. “I’m late for a gig in Walnut Creek.” Uncle Rudy paid me no attention. He wanted to know more about the car, how it drove.
LATER WHEN I GOT BACK from the gig, I hid myself away from the world in the manor house. My room was overcrowded with junk. There was barely any space to sleep. Riken the mountaineer came in and turned on a lamp. “How did it go?” he asked. “It went all right. I played the blues, just as you advised. They liked it.” Riken nodded. It was like he knew everything before it was going to happen. Fish dropping from the sky with pirate skeletons? No problem. Gig in Walnut Creek for which one is ill-prepared? Just play some Son House.
“See, I knew you could do it,” Riken said approvingly. “I knew that you could play the blues.”
north! 