The Fish was nine years old and lived at the Lone Star Motel out by the highway. Which means he was essentially homeless.
He was always up all night; mainly because no one cared.
Every man I’ve ever known was such a cowboy child as this. It begins in pajamas. Fish would be a cowboy, too. Even if it was nothing more than a cowboy fantasy. The Fish at least has the pajamas.
But what does it mean to be a cowboy?
With HIV?
I WAS FISHING with John Manuel. He is the sort of friend who just comes by and steps into my life with his more than kind admonitions: "You have got to get out!" he says.
I was attempting to tell him about The Fish. The Fish is almost unexplainable.
I was fishing with a line tied around my finger, the way I’d fished when I was a kid. You simply put a hook on it and a worm. Most boys these days have never heard of such a thing.
The day was frogs and hot. Even the copperheads were too languid to move on the sun-baked logs. The fishing pond was childless and silent. John released a perch. It seemed to fly away from us through the cool darkness of the fishing pond and underneath the shadows of the boat.
That was when it hit me.
It hit me like the deep flapping, smacking sound a big black bass makes when it jumps on what always seems to be the other side of the lake. SMACK against the mirror that is the fishing pond.
SMACK! I wasn’t on the reservation.
Those of us who fish on the reservation fish for food. We wouldn’t anymore return the fish we caught to the black realms of the bottom of the lake than we would return our children to the black realms of the womb.
The fish belong to the darkness of the lake. They are not really our fish.
Our children, too, belong to the darkness of their mothers in ways only fathers fathom.
But we would never let them go. What letting go we do with and of them is sheer illusion.
I CALL THESE BOYS MINE. I did not make them.
I would return them if I could. I have no receipt.
I run a support group for boys with AIDS. When my own adopted 12-year-old Indian son died from the disease, I had to do something. I am from North America. We are measured as men against what we do. Since I write for a living, some think I do absolutely nothing.
I still wake up early every morning with something of a start, thinking, Be quick about it, you fool—you have to DO something!
Anything. Anything to keep me from having to think or feel. I was insane. I wasn’t just burned out. I was toast.
Fish food.
IN OUR SUPPORT GROUP FOR BOYS with AIDS we discuss the side-effects they feel from many of the antiretrovirals used to treat HIV today—side-effects that compound their sense of alienation, the feeling of being lost. A drug called Sustiva (efavirenz) causes what the medical literature calls "LSD-like dreams." Since many of the boys take it, they wanted to know if anyone else in the group dreams like they do.
"I have these dreams," Fish told the group.
Everyone smiled, even when they tried not to. Some of the older boys know Fish from the hospital. They seem to only tolerate him, but at the edges of that tolerance is the fondness of an older brother.
So everyone smiled, and Fish, of course, launched immediately into a mythological rendition of The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade.
"He’s retarded," the older boys have said more than once. While the Fish may appear to be almost retarded, he is, in fact, anything but. The Fish is one of the smartest human beings I have ever met.
"I know why man invented fire," he told me once while we were fishing where I live at Jordan Lake, south of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
"Oh?" I said. "Pray, tell me," knowing that he would anyway.
"In the face of countless mythical motifs, primitive man, which is what I am, really, confronted the eternal fight between man and monster, hero and dragon. Paradigmatic figure and images. Maidens and paradise. And let us not forget—hell itself."The Fish smiled.
My eyes to the sky.
I didn’t know if Fish was just being a smartass jackass or if he really knew these things or had even thought about them. Today, I know the Fish better—he was being a well-read jackass.
Books are one of my biggest struggles with these boys.
I used to give them books my friends were kind enough to give away. But cut off from society, these boys live in the world of their heads; they can go through an entire novel in a day. No mere library could keep up with them.
The Fish has lived most of his nine years with his great-grandmother, surrounded by a storytelling culture. He tends to see everything through the lens of stories, and he attempts to live his own life as if he were telling one.
Fish was living in the motel because they had lost everything. Every kid with AIDS can tell you horror stories about loss. AIDS is the story of loss. Parents lose their jobs. Families lose their health coverage. Children bounce from foster home to foster home, try finding one that doesn’t mind the interjection of HIV into the dynamics of the group.
How people lose everything is almost unimportant. They just do. Fish sleeps for 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there. Nothing is regular anymore.
"I HAVE THESE DREAMS," Fish told our support group. One of the ways into the inner Fish is through his dreams. They are quick as foxes, Fish’s dreams.
"I had me a dream yesterday when I came back from X-ray, and I had to lie down, you know, I could not keep my lids open one more minute. I could barely breathe. It was a bad dream, too. Then I had another one at night, and I want them to go away, please. Can you help me with it?"
I cannot. Fish knows that. I do not know why he tells me about his dreams. They are usually dark and disturbing, colder shadows in the sand he walks on.
"My name is Fish," he said, breaking the silence.
This not-so-new admission brought on a riotous laughter. The other boys went nuts. They already knew who he was.
Everyone knows, too, his name isn’t really the Fish. But it’s the nickname he likes, so why not let him have it? The Fish does not have too many things.
He does have a very ratty stuffed animal, chewed and drooled on, that looks like it was once a chipmunk. He denies its existence. When he’s asleep with his chipmunk, he could be five, six.
I thought the other boys were laughing and falling out of their chairs because they found Fish amusing, which they do. But the real reason they were laughing is because they had seen Fish’s dog-and-pony-show before.
And nine really gets them where they live. They were all nine once and had chipmunks, too.
FISH IS THE YOUNGEST boy in the group.
"He’s too young," I told the teacher who referred Fish to the group. "The other boys are 13, 14. They’re dealing with adolescent issues." This is buzz for sex. Who says boys with HIV are going to give up sex. I may be insane, but I do live in the real world.
"You’re going to like Fish," I was told. "Fish would be bored to death with boys his own age."
True enough. Think North Carolina contemporary version of Huckleberry Finn. Barefoot. Cane pole. River. Worms. Straw hair that falls into ice-blue eyes. Freckles on the nose. Truly rotten socks.
He wanted to know if I could be his new dad. He needs a new dad, he said. He scratched his head.
Lice.
They fall down onto his shoulders. He picks them up, squeezes them between his fingernails, and stares at them. Then he squishes them.
"I need a dad," he said. Again.
The Fish understands that one of my weaknesses is my curiosity around the construction of languages. He sets nets of words to capture me.
He uses terms such as kneewalking drunk.
That Late Unpleasantness (the Civil War—or his day at school).
Sold down the river (what his daddy did to him).
Worse than the plagues of Egypt (his great-grandmother becoming frail so quickly).
Abscess of the Bowels (his old gym teacher).
Crawthumper (religious person).
Drinking mash and talking trash ("What was your mother like?").
Bumfidgets ("What is wrong with you now?").
Boogers ("What would you like for dinner tonight?").
The Fish wants to be an astrophotographer when he grows up. Someone who stares at stars all day.
For the first few years of his life, the Fish lived in New York City, but he does not remember it. His mother left the city, moved in with her own grandmother in North Carolina, and died. The world Fish remembers is the Neuse River and his great-grandmother, whom Fish describes warmly as "that Corncracker."
"We fished at night with chicken guts when the tide went out, pleased as a basketful of possum heads," Fish says. "First light, we’d have a fish fry over Gumbotown, and my Gram would make blueberry fritters."
He wears hip-hop clothes from Wal-Mart, swims in his underpants, and can rap with the African-American boys from Durham with a poetic finesse unheard of anywhere on the Neuse.
He has a banana bike no one wants.
"I need a dad so no Yankee Bolliwog Blown Up Like a Toad can mess with me, Bubba," he pouts.
I learned many, many years ago that you cannot survive in the world of counseling at-risk children if you succumb easily to guilt.
"Fish," I say. "Being someone’s dad is like getting married. It’s very serious."
"You mean, like, if you were my new dad, there would be like new rules?"
Yaaaaaaa. A few.
There are rules I would very much like to impose on Fish (he wears the same socks for at least two weeks—or longer, if he likes the socks), so we decide to keep things as they are. We are great and righteous friends.
MY BOYS WANT THE RESPONSIBILITY for dispensing their HIV medication. Dispensation of their medication is freedom. If they are in charge of their medication, then they do not have to show up in prescribed places at prescribed times.
Anyone who lets Fish dispense his own medication should have his head examined. His medication schedule would confuse a nuclear physicist. Fish had an asthma attack that almost killed him; he arrived at the emergency room ashen-black. His Gram can no longer deal with his increasingly complex medical needs. I haven’t told him yet (I’ve been putting it off), but she is going to be put in a nursing home.
Most of my boys have lived with AIDS all their lives. Most live in foster homes. A few live with their real parent. This is never plural. Many of them are still grieving over parents who have died. Some of them are very angry that their mothers passed HIV to them. I believe that Fish’s hyperactivity and ADHD is a result of his mom’s use of crack.
Fish has learned that he can avoid having to deal with any of his stuff if he assumes the official role of Court Jester. It is an attention-getting device—an instrument of loneliness. If someone notices his socks (he likes socks with glitter), Fish will remove his shoes, causing great panic and moaning among the group.
Group is at the beginning of the week. I reserve Fridays for the ones who are in the hospital. On weekends I may have one or two boys over, and sometimes I get calls from foster parents who are in dire need of a break. I give them what is called respite care. My wife and I live in the North Carolina woods in an ancient, falling apart log cabin on a lake. I have an old (very borrowed) boat, and fish when I can. My boys love taking long walks in the woods where we talk about anything they want to talk about. I do more listening than I do fishing.
I do not have sex with them. Let’s sweep that off the table now. We are talking AIDS here. Imagine: an entire culture that refuses to work with its children because it is afraid of what others might think of the intimacy that might or might not occur. Sex is not the issue. Power is the issue.
I have more power than I really want over these boys.
SOMETIMES WE LOSE BOYS.
I am still struggling to create rituals that have meaning for them. I have all the boys say goodbye to an empty chair in the circle. It gets very choked up when we do that. These are boys who crave closure—they have so often been denied it. Some of them have had siblings who have died as well as mom and dad. It’s real important that they do not feel alone, or guilty at being someone who still struggles but lives. These are boys who have gone to a lot of funerals.
Fish held my hand at the last funeral. One of the older boys brought him over to where I was standing with the men at the cemetery.
"Will you please take him or do something with him?" Sam said. Sam will be 15 in a month. Fifteen years with AIDS.
"Sure, Sam. Fish, hold my hand. Stand over here." Sam had a hankie for Fish. Fish blew his nose. It was a loud blow.
I had to take him into a public restroom. "Fish what is this?"
His chipmunk had been crammed down into his pants. He begged me not to tell.
I held the chipmunk so everyone would think it was my chipmunk.
"Do I gotta go back to the hospital?" Fish asked when the gravesite service was over. To lose a friend and then to wonder where you will be tonight.
"No. You’re coming back to the cabin with me, Fish. Just for the weekend. We’ll give Gram a little break, okay? Then, you have to go back. No arguments."
His eyes lit up a little bit. He likes my cabin. He likes my lake (Jordan Lake, and it isn’t mine). But Fish especially likes my dog, Navajo.
Navajo is an Assistance Dog.
I have avascular necrosis. My bones are dying. My shoulders are riddled with fractures that cannot be repaired.
This kind of AVN comes from drinking the water on the Navajo Reservation that was contaminated by uranium mining. They forgot to tell us that our water was now (and would be probably forever) radioactive. All my reservation friends are dead.
Sometimes I walk with crutches. Last year, I went through several bone replacement surgeries, and I am much better than before. Before was the limited world of the wheelchair.
Now I sometimes walk with a cane and Navajo. She is my balance and my eyes. She saves my life at least once a day—mostly from cars. The Fish adores this dog. Navajo is unlike any dog he’s ever known.
I am considered good at this work with dying boys. I am good at this because I have avascular necrosis. Pain and I are old shipmates.
I am good at this because I understand that you are here today. Make the best of it with what you’ve got. You might not be here tomorrow.
Fish knows.
We are good at this—Fish maintains as he hangs upside down on some park’s monkey bars—because "we supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward like if we had a gun."
Like if we had a gun.
Fish is wise at nine. It is not possible to fool him. I’ve only had to cope with a crippling disease since the onset of middle age. These boys have had to cope with a virulent disease—one that can cripple them, too—all their lives. We know this: it isn’t what we say that counts. It’s what we do that has meaning.
I am the man who takes The Fish fishing.
THE LAST TIME WE WENT FISHING we decided that we would be best friends. Best friends hug. Best friends know each other’s names.
His real name is Jules.
"You’re laughing!" he says. His lower lip juts out. His jaw clenched. His fists held stiffly at his waist.
"I’m only laughing a little bit,"
"I knew you’d laugh," he pouts. Then a grin spreads freckle-to-freckle across his face. What saves Fish is his ability to laugh at himself. Most nine-year-olds do not do it well.
This trip, he rides in the bow, trailing his hand in the water, feeling its power, and making some of it his own.
AIDS is a disease of shame in the South. Shame wears him down. His body, once a thing of joy, has turned on him. With his hand running in the night water, Fish remarks that snakes do not come out this far into the lake.
"Don’t they?"
"Nope. Snakes sleep at night with their chipmunks."
He laughs. And you can see why he is, in the final analysis, Jules. He is sweet.
"My daddy went to prison."
No one has ever seen his daddy. The daddy who isn’t there, has never been there, will never be there is a fantasy as common as cereal among my boys—to see who has the best daddy an imagination can buy. Let him have his daddies.
I catch more fish than he does. He watches and tries to be not too incredulous when I return the fish.
"Beeekuzzzz," he says, almost to himself, "just catching a thing don’t mean you gotta kill it."
Our boat drifts over to the swamp side where the ferns drip and the fog hangs. I let him man the engine and take us slowly ("I said, ‘Slowly!’") into the deeper middle of the lake.
"I would like to swim," he says. "I used to."
"It’s dark."
Yaaaa. Dark and dangerous.
Lights shine from cars passing over the bridge at the northern end of Jordan Lake. Jules disrobes. In the shadows, he is almost ethereal—white, like marble; fragile, a seedling pressed for time, and impermanent.
He knows not to step on hooks.
Instead of saying no (this is where I should be saying it), I hand him a lifejacket. He puts it around his neck, and I tie the thing where the ties go, and snap the thing where the snaps go. Reaching out to keep his balance, his hands touch my shoulder, as if safety is something I can imbue him with, and trust is something you can touch: You will not drown, or be abused, or immersed in something you cannot do. You will not forget you had these days of wonder, without bounds, where length, breadth, and height, and time, and place are lost.
Like you will be, too, without me.
I am probably as close as he will get—or can get—to another human being. His Court Jester facsimiles are so well constructed. Not much gets through. I am returning him like I might a fish.
"Don’t drown, okay."
"Okay."
His need for connection is inexhaustible. He has been loved. He knows what it is to have that. So many of them have not been loved. They have been fed, cared for, tolerated.
"Who taught you to fish, boy?"
"My Gram."
He wipes his eyes with the back of his arm. Nine-year-old snot drips from him. They are so much like lizards.
I think he knows about the nursing home. I say nothing.
I am utterly gutless.
He dips into the water. I can hear him breathing hard. Not too hard. Exhilarated. He clings to the gunwales of the boat and does not let go.
When he is done, I pull him up. The dog whines. She would like to lick him. I throw him a clean rag that was once a towel. He dries, gets dressed.
He has to help me pull the boat in. Onshore, I am the cripple.
"Hey, I got my socks wet!"
How unfortunate. Now maybe we could wash them.
We head for the cabin. I let him have the dog on her leash. I have my cane in one hand, and he holds my free hand. We are equal in the darkness.
"Someday," he tells me, "I will show you how to fish with just your finger!"
Fish laughs and the noise of it bounces off the water like a frog. A big black bass jumps somewhere out there with the monsters and the witches. Fish tells me that you can still hold hands on the darker nights when things, just things, are out there.
And it doesn’t have to be just in dreams that roam within us, or at the funeral of a friend.
Photo: Full Moon Lake, by The Fish
Yinishye Nasdijj, whose mother was Navajo, grew up partly on the reservation and partly in migrant camps across the United States. He is the author of The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, a New York Times Notable Book, as well as Geronimo’s Bones and The Boy and His Dog are Sleeping. He and his wife, Tina Giovanni, recently moved to New Mexico and run a group home for boys (including Fish) with AIDS.
"Nasdijj" is Athabaskan for "to become again."