Fish Food (a novel about life, death, and commas)

By James D. Loy

Michael Uxem is a grammar-obsessed, hearing-impaired evolutionary biologist who shares his home on Martha’s Vineyard with three cats, an irascible parrot, and a tankful of red-bellied piranhas (his wife left him years ago for an Andersen Windows salesman). The goal of his scientific work is to discover a shark repellent that can be applied by beach-going humans as part of their sun cream (hence the piranhas, small-scale experimental substitutes for sharks). Just as his research is reaching a critical point, Mike’s life is complicated when his senile uncle, Leroi Uxem, comes north from Tennessee and moves in with him. That’s when pets and people start disappearing and everything gets out of hand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AbsolutelyAmazingEbooks.com
• Release date: Jul 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310783876

Book preview

Fish

Food

James D. Loy

2013

Is an imprint of

ABSOLUTELY AMAZING eBOOKS

Published by Whiz Bang LLC, 926 Truman Avenue, Key West, Florida 33040, USA

Copyright © 2013 by James Loy. Electronic compilation/print edition copyright © 2013 by Whiz Bang LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized ebook editions.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. While the author has made every effort to provide accurate information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their contents.

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This book is dedicated to all of my friends and relatives, and especially my former colleagues at the University of Rhode Island. I have shamelessly stolen your jokes, quips, and anecdotes—and occasionally your behavioral idiosyncrasies. Please don’t sue me.

JDL

Fish

Food

Chapter 1

Is-Be the cat sat staring intently into the murky waters of the huge semi-subterranean tank. Periodically, flashes of movement caught her eye and caused the tabby’s miniscule brain to generate a quasi-thought roughly translatable as Salmon? (the only kind of fish she knew, and that from a can). Still, despite the lure of the movements in the depths, Is-Be was very careful to sit well away from the tank’s edge and to resist the temptation to dabble her paw in the water. Her abbreviated tail served as a vivid reminder that the fish swimming so peacefully below were, in fact, a threat to life and limbs, including tails. Red-bellied piranhas (Pygocentrus nattereri) that reached a foot in length and seven pounds at adulthood, they were capable of impressive leaps to seize prey foolish enough to tarry at the water’s edge.

The fish, which made up a school of some twenty-odd blunt-nosed, toothy creatures, were the research subjects – and if truth be told, pets – of Is-Be’s ichthyological human companion, Dr. Michael Uxem. After spending the early stages of his career in Upper Peninsula, Michigan teaching and serving briefly as the Dean of Students at Mush University (founded in the pre-cornflake days by the Kellogg family to educate their workers, but now part of the state university system and proud home of the fighting Mush U. Huskies), Dr. Uxem, or Big Mike, as he liked to style himself, was now a staff scientist at the Poseidon Oceanographic Institute (POI) on Martha’s Vineyard. Although he had other groups of piranhas at the Institute that were his actual experimental subjects, it had appealed to Uxem’s unique sense of humor to set up a school of red-bellies in the sunroom of his house high atop Prospect Hill on the Vineyard’s southwest end. The house, a rambling nineteenth century structure set on a large parcel of farmland, overlooked the little village of Menemsha (pop. 1,160) which was neatly framed by the ocean on one side and Menemsha Pond on the other, and provided an excellent view of the Gay Head light some four miles beyond. From the vantage point of his front porch, Uxem enjoyed spectacular sunsets in the company of Is-Be and her littermates, Am-Are and Was-Were. The three cats were named for certain of the helping verbs, the list of which had been drilled into Uxem’s brain during his middle school years. When they weren’t lounging beside the piranha tank, the cats roamed freely around the house and grounds, feasting on the occasional mole or unwary bird. Besides the cats and fish, Uxem shared the house with an ancient parrot named Elmo who had a bad temper and a four-phrase vocabulary: Bye bye! Dumb ass! Bad cat! Bite me! When excited, Elmo ran the phrases together, giving the appearance of a single coherent message, as indeed it may have been in his bird’s brain. Most evenings, after feeding Is-Be and the gang and enjoying his own meal, Uxem would drop a raw Cornish hen or some other fleshy treat into the piranhas’ tank and watch their feeding frenzy. They were true examples of nature red in tooth and claw, as Tennyson so famously put it.

The sunroom’s piranha tanks were Uxem’s own design and were much more complex than simply a matching pair of aquaria. Connected by a PVC pipeline, the tanks made up a double-chambered affair that enabled the fish to be easily transferred to a fresh tank when their old one needed cleaning. Each tank was 8’ x 8’ x 8’ in size, with its rim some two feet above the sunroom floor. The rims were neatly framed with wooden decking so that an observer, whether human or feline, could sit comfortably at tank-side while manipulating the fish or watching their gristly meals. Uxem was especially proud of the push button control system he had invented for inter-chamber transfers. Touching a red button opened the pipeline and allowed the fish, which were thoroughly trained to the procedure, to quickly change living quarters. A second button, this one blue in color, opened a drain that emptied the fouled tank. Uxem then donned what amounted to haz-mat gear and clambered down into the dirty tank to scrub its walls and remove the bones that littered the floor. After that chore was done, pushing a third button, green this time, closed the drain and refilled the newly cleaned tank with powerful jets of water. The bones from the piranhas’ meals were not wasted. Environmentalist that he was, Uxem kept a commercial grade iron-burr bone grinder in his garden shed and used it to render recovered bones into meal. His roses and tomato plants were regular winners of island-wide competitions.

Mike Uxem himself was a singular piece of work at the age of forty-five. Six feet seven inches tall and distinctly angular, he conjured up an image of Washington Irving’s Ichabod Crane. Seeing no reason why he should waste good money on barbers, once a month he used a pair of electric clippers to trim his graying hair into a rough buzz cut. Equally careless about his clothing, Uxem’s wardrobe consisted mainly of khaki pants and flannel shirts from L. L. Bean, the sleeves of the latter never quite reaching the wrists of his orangutan-like arms. Rounding off this field naturalist look, Uxem favored scuffed camp mocs regardless of the season or the weather.

Mike’s ex-wife, Max (short for Maxine), had grown tired of this look, as well as her husband’s many behavioral idiosyncrasies, and called it quits five years ago. High on Max’s list of complaints was the fact that after relocating from the woods of northern Michigan to Martha’s Vineyard, they had failed to take regular advantage of Boston’s cultural events and fine dining. To her dismay, it proved almost impossible to get Mike off the island. He preferred to stay at home and watch TV, or at most do a bar crawl in Menemsha. Although not a misanthrope, he was much less social than Max was, leaving her with the prospect of years of semi-solitude on their rural hilltop. And exacerbating matters even further was Mike’s insistence on filling their house with naturalistic oddities, including a two-foot long walrus baculum and what he claimed was the genuine shrunken head of an Amazonian Indian. When these and other equally weird items started to overflow from Mike’s study into the rest of the house, Max rather naturally objected. Her husband’s utter inability to understand that crystal objets d’art are not enhanced by placing a pinniped penis bone in the same display case contributed not a little to Max’s discontent.

The most exhausting of all of Max’s challenges, however, had been dealing with her husband’s unilateral deafness and resulting communication problems. Mike’s hearing loss was noise-induced – as is so often the case in these days of iPods and ear buds – and it could be traced back to his purchase of an original Walkman music player in 1979. The then-fourteen-year-old Uxem had, of course, cranked up the Walkman’s sound level to full blast, which not only distorted his favorite tunes in a most wonderful way, but also put him far beyond the reach of his mother’s voice. As an apparently ingenious and fool-proof compromise, Mother Uxem disconnected the wiring to her son’s right earpiece, a modification that allowed her to get his attention via that ear. The other ear continued to bear the brunt of full-bore rock and roll, however, with the predictable result that Mike developed noise-induced deafness on his left side.

In the short run, Mother Uxem’s scheme may have restored a degree of parent-child communication, but after just a few months her son began to pay for it with unilateral deafness that complicated the rest of his life, including ultimately helping to end his marriage. As people with this sort of disability can appreciate, Mike had a strong tendency to mishear comments that were not spoken directly into his good ear. Furthermore, his brain tended to convert garbled phrases into mondegreens – homophonically similar phrases – that more often than not were nonsensical. Sometimes the resulting miscommunications were funny, but sometimes they were embarrassing or even costly. A prime example of the latter category occurred a few months into Mike’s term as Dean of Students at Mush U. One evening he found himself at a noisy cocktail party given by the Provost in honor of the arrival of his niece (the Provost’s, that is) at Mush for her freshman year. Despite the background din, Mike had been dutifully trying to chat with the young honoree for several minutes, the strain of intense listening being accompanied by much brow furrowing on his part and leaning in close to hear her answers. The Provost, a short man with a Napoleon complex and a hair-trigger temper, didn’t like what he saw and accosted his Dean with this bizarre allegation: Ookike deer teeth, Uxem! What the hell is that supposed to mean? thought Mike, glancing alternately from the glaring Provost to the niece, who had stepped back a few paces and was looking distinctly grossed out. Unfortunately, Mike was too embarrassed to ask for a repeat and simply tried to short-circuit the interaction by saying, Right you are, Chief, usually a safe response to one’s boss. Later that day, however, as he was being stripped of his deanship and transferred back to Biology, Mike learned that he had misheard a pointed accusation from an angry uncle: Looks like you’re leering at my niece, Uxem! Oh well, Mike consoled himself. He was tired of pushing paper and dealing with helicopter parents anyway.

And at home, Mike’s poor hearing made communicating with his family a constant challenge. He complained that Max talked in a barely audible whisper and that their kid spoke in grunts and half sentences. It wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t hear most of what they said. And all broadcast media were problematic, of course, since even with the TV or radio volume cranked way up – Turn it down! Max would plead – Mike was likely to lose portions of dialog or news stories (e.g., he once misheard the local FM news reporting a slash mom operating at the local mall, when, in fact, it was a flash mob of Christmas carolers). At the Poseidon Institute, Uxem’s left-side deafness was as well known as his habit of referring to himself as Big Mike, with the result that when colleagues misheard one another they just laughed it off as a BM moment. Newcomers to POI were understandably startled the first time they heard a co-worker say, I just had a BM moment, but they quickly got the hang of the insider joke.

Maxine Uxem, however, had finally gotten to the point where the combination of hearing loss and behavioral eccentricities was no longer a laughing, or tolerable, matter. When she left her husband, she took their eight-year-old son, Ussher, with her. Called Usshie by his mother and The Bishop by his dad, Ussher was named for Bishop James Ussher, an Irish cleric who famously proclaimed in the 17th century that the Earth and all its creatures had been divinely created in 4004 BC. Following the logic of a boy named Sue, Usshie’s pro-evolution father explained the name by saying he hoped it would help strengthen his son against creationist craziness. Max let Mike have his way in the matter of Ussher’s naming, but later regretted her decision. Two years after divorcing Mike, Max married a Denver-based representative for Andersen Windows and ceased to have any real presence in her ex’s life. These days Mrs. Windows (as Uxem referred to Max when he was in a foul mood) rarely contacted her former husband unless it was to confer about money. It was an arrangement that suited Mike just fine, although in general he bore Max no ill feelings. Their most recent telephone conversation had been about The Bishop’s need for braces and Max’s request that they split the cost.

But if Mike could live happily without Max, the same was not true concerning his son. The boy had been the apple of his father’s eye and it hurt like hell when Max remarried and moved Ussher half way across the country. True, Mike was granted two week’s custody every summer, but two weeks out of fifty-two wasn’t much and he regretted missing most of his son’s childhood. Each summer it was like meeting a new Ussher, with a bigger body, new interests, and new talents. And this year, due to plans for an extended overseas vacation hatched by Mr. Windows, Ussher wouldn’t be coming to see his dad at all. It really wasn’t fair, thought Mike. Why had he ever agreed to such a wildly asymmetrical custody arrangement in the first place?

In any event, with Max and Ussher gone Mike had only himself, three cats, and a parrot to please. Accordingly, he had resumed his pre-marital persona of a rumpled, relatively well-fed, and relatively happy (although not infrequently lonely) bachelor. He was just finishing one major NSF grant at POI and was working hard on a renewal proposal. Life was pretty good. And if only Americans would learn to speak and write decent English, life would go from pretty good to excellent.

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The horrific language skills of American undergraduates were, in fact, high on the list of reasons Uxem had abandoned a tenured academic job to try his luck as a soft-money researcher. By anyone’s definition, he was an obsessive language purist, but he came by it honestly. His seventh grade English teacher had been Miss Elsie Jenkins, an overbearing Grammar Nazi if there ever was one. She not only taught Mike the twenty-one helping verbs and the rules of punctuation, but also managed to instill in her pupil an almost religious reverence for correct English. Indeed, Miss Jenkins’ influence had been so strong that whenever Mike was confronted by a language error he would ask himself, WWJD? i.e., What would Jenkins do? And for a language freak, it was almost unbearable how frequently Mush U. students had butchered their mother tongue, e.g., "Her and me went to the Student Union." They misspelled words, split infinitives, dangled participles, cobbled perfectly good independent sentences into run-ons, changed tenses randomly, misused apostrophes