Plain of Jars: and Other Stories

The Odor of Dead Fish

$ 11 $ The Odor of Dead Fish Sometime after midnight, two hours or so after the movie ended, Frank Lawson was still walking the dark, rainswept streets of Oceanside, which were now all but deserted. The shuttle bus that would take him back to the base, and to another week of Marine Corps duty, wasn’t due to arrive until three-thirty, but he didn’t care to spend the time waiting in the bus station. When he had gone to the station after the movie, he had found it crowded with Marines, young men such as himself, on weekend liberty and dreading going back to the base after their short tenures of freedom in the civilian world. Feeling the need for solitude, a feeling the depths of which he was certain was particular only to himself, Frank wanted to spend the remaining time alone in the town, as though to squeeze a last drop of desperate privacy from the fleeting holiday. Oceanside was a beach town, huddled like a large parasite near the main gate and on the seafront border of Camp Pendleton. Its economy was based on the Marines who flocked in on liberty to wander aimlessly through the streets and bars and movie houses, getting fleeced by the local merchants. There was no love lost between town and jarheads: at one time, Frank had heard, there used to be a sign on the City Hall lawn that proclaimed marines and dogs keep off the grass. The sign had been removed, but not the sentiments it had contained. In the winter, sea winds sometimes slashed and buffeted the Oceanside coastline like a wrathful Dark Night of the Soul, their wind-driven sand, salt, and seawater wreaking an impervious and indifferent vengeance on 12 $ geary hobson the town and the land—except for when the sun shone, which seemed to be most of the time. The sun made its mark, too, making an equally indifferent judgment on the coast and probably caring even less about its consequences than the winter sea winds. Frank was eighteen, but there were already lines of a perpetual sardonic scowl beginning to etch the ordinarily inquisitive and expectant expression of his features. He had been in the Marines about six months and still retained something of the curious aura of naiveté common to most boot privates, but a baffled anger, imposed by days of frustrating duty and organized stupidity, had started to take its toll on him. As Frank walked along Hill Street, a few blocks from the oceanfront, the December wind chilled him with thin sprays of rain and salt water. Drops of water matted in his crew cut and trailed in rivulets down his face and into his shirt collar. The cold penetrated his thin rayon jacket with the glazed sharpness of frozen needles. The streets were black and shiny, as though lacquered, from the night’s alternating squalls of rain and sea mist. Along the sidewalks gutter water glistened like oil, reflecting the neon lights of the stores and bars. Illuminated signs—“Fisherman’s Inn,” “The Cozy Cove,” “Tattoos–All Kinds,” “Pete’s”— glared dully in the street. He realized he was hungry. He had to think for a moment before remembering that he hadn’t eaten since noon and then only a hamburger. Now, trying to recall the names of the films he had just seen, he found he couldn’t remember them. He had sat through the double feature twice, allowing the hours to slip by, being by turns both interested and indifferent to the crap reeled forth on the screen. He knew he had been wasting time, but in the Crotch, as he had discovered, any effort at trying not to waste time was like hurrying through one long and tedious boredom only to arrive at the next. Besides feeling breathless and weary with the “hurry-up-and-wait” way of life, you felt cheated by it, and soon you were almost unable to care anymore how you played the game. Strong on the breeze of the sea wind, a particularly rancid odor of dead fish from somewhere down on the beach pervaded the streets like a black plague. It was an insistent smell, almost nauseating, and its scent had been there ever since Frank had been on the streets—and probably before that. It seemed to be growing even more pungent as the night wore on. A smell of tar and oil from the odor of dead fish...