The Fish and the Not Fish by Peter Markus Read Free Book Online

one who is not the boy with Jane on the back of his bike.
    There are nights when You and Him fight.
    For Jane.
    Nights when Him and You make the blood run down red from the tips of a nose that has just been by a balled up fist hit to say in a way that words just can’t, Jane is just and all mine.
    You Know Who jumps on the back of the bike with Jane not on it—on this night this would be Him’s bike that Jane is on—and like this the boys ride through town with the girls with their long girl hair blown back by the wind that the bikes make when Him and You pump their feet back and forth as they bike like this till they stop.
    Where and when they stop there is this house at the edge of this town where this town comes to an end and is the start of a new town with a name that is all its own. This house, with no white fence out front in the front of its front yard, it is white and made out of wood. Here in this house there is no one here who lives in it. This house with the glass that is now shut in with wood, it used to have an old man who lived here in it, but it’s been years since this house has had this man who looked out from in it. This man whose name was known by all those in town as Old Man Mans, he has been dead for all of the years since Him and You and You Know Who and that girl named Jane have been boys and girls who call the town that is theirs their own. But still it is well known, by both sets of boys and girls, that this old man, Old Man Mans, he was a mean old man, the kind of a man who liked to spit and kick at his dog. That’s the kind of man that this Old Man Mans was. For some years, more than a few, that old dog that Old Man Mans liked to spit at and kick, it lived on its own, once the old man died, out back in the back of the old man’s house. It, this dog, it had a house of its own, out back in the back of the old man’s house, and this house, that was the dog’s, where the dog it liked to sleep, it too, it was white just like the old man’s house, and it was made out of wood too. It’s true that this dog, it lived on for some years more in the white house out back of the old man’s house. It lived, this dog did, till one night, it’s been told, it ran out to the road that runs out through to where this house sits and it sat out in the road till it got hit by a truck that when it hit it, the man who sat up in the front of this truck, he did not stop or get out or look back once to see what it was that his truck had just hit. It, this truck, it had just hit and it had just killed the dog that once lived in a house of its own out back in the house that used to house in it the man in this town known to most all as the man who liked to spit at and kick at his dog.

    So there are times when You and Him walk out back to the back of this old man’s yard to fight. Here, like this, these two boys face off and here, like this, Him and You, they raise up their fists. Come on, they say. Put up your dukes, one of them will say. Come on, boy, take the first punch. Both of these boys will bob with their boy heads. One of the boys will make the first move. One boy will spit at, then kick at, the dirt. One boy will thumb his thumb to his nose. This is the way these boys say, not with their words, I’m tough.
    Then, like this, they fight. They throw a punch or three or four and stick a thumb in one boy’s eye. You and Him, they do not wince or flinch or make a sound with their boy mouths when they hit like this with their fists. They fight, they spit, they lick at their lips till one of these two boys says, Give up? Give up? Give up what? one boy will say and he’ll hit his own fists bone to bone. Give up, the boy who says these words will say it, the girl who goes by the name Jane. Jane the Pain is how the boys call her when she is not near to them to hear this said. But still the boys fight. They fight till the girls who are with them tell them to stop.