We Make Mud

The Man Whose Guitar was a Fish

There was this man in our town, this dirty river town, who used to come into town to play his guitar, on street corners, outside of bars, down by the river even, him and his guitar standing and sparkling in the spotlight of the moon, and he’d play that guitar of his as if it was some fish fished out of some river unknown to us brothers, some other river other than the dirty river that runs its way through this dirty river town. This man who played this guitar of his like it was some kind of a fish, he was not our father, though there were times, like when he was closing his eyes and singing, when we wished that maybe he was, our father. What this man was, this man who sang and played his guitar like it was some kind of a fish fished out of some river unknown to us, this man, he was not our father, but what he was was, he was our father’s brother. Our father, our father who did not sing or play the guitar, our father who liked to fish, our father who walked down to the river, one night, he walked out into the river, he walked out across the river, one night, and did not come walking back: our father did not call this brother of his Brother the way that us brothers do. Our father, what our father called his brother was, he called his brother Joe. Hey, Joe, we’d hear our father say. But this Joe, our father’s brother who our father did not call him Brother the way us brothers call each other Brother, this Joe never said anything, he never gave any words to our father back. Sometimes this Joe, our father’s brother, he would break out into song when he heard his brother’s voice, our father’s, calling out to him, Hey, Joe. But most of the time, our father’s brother, he was quiet. Sometimes, he would just be standing there and we wouldn’t even know it. Sometimes, it made us brothers think that maybe this Joe, our father’s brother, was, like Boy, born without a tongue on the inside of his mouth. Maybe when he sang, maybe to be able to sing like our father’s brother was able to sing, maybe the sounds that he made with his mouth came from some other place deep inside his man body. Maybe those sounds had nothing to do with being born with or born without a tongue inside his mouth. Or maybe our father’s brother didn’t give any words back to our father, maybe he acted like he didn’t hear it when our father said to him, Hey, Joe, maybe he was sometimes deaf, or maybe our father’s brother sometimes didn’t say any words back to our father calling to him, Hey, Joe, because Joe, Joe was not our father’s brother’s name. What our father’s brother’s real name was, it was Hank. But our father was the first to say, to this brother of his, that there were already too many guitar-singing singers in this world who go by the name of Hank. So Joe was the name that our father called his brother by. Hey, Joe, our father would say. And so Joe was what us brothers, Joe was what our father and our mother and the rest of the townspeople who lived in our town, Joe was what we all called our father’s brother by whenever we called him, which wasn’t very often, because Joe liked it best to be left alone with just himself and his guitar that he played as if this guitar was some sort of a fish. But to us brothers, after a while, to our brother ears, the name Joe didn’t sound right, not for our father’s brother, not for this man who could make his guitar and make with his mouth, or make come out of his mouth, a sound that sounded, a sound that sang out, just like a fish. So us brothers, what we did was, when we wanted to call out to our father’s brother was, we called him Uncle Fish, because him being a brother to our father made him be an uncle, our mother explained it, to us. But sometimes, too, us brothers, we liked to call him Uncle Guitar with our boy mouths making a loud hard g-sound when we said that word guitar, like gee-tar, or sometimes, when we had the breath inside us to make our mouths say it, we’d call him, our father’s brother, our uncle, The Man Whose Guitar was a Fish. It wasn’t really a fish, this guitar, but it sometimes, to us brothers, looked like it was, the way its sparkly guitar body and silvery steel strings used to shimmer and shine and shoot back out at us moonlight when our father’s brother, when Joe, when Hank, when Uncle Fish, when Uncle Guitar, when The Man Whose Guitar was a Fish, used to strum with his big-knuckled hand across its mouth to make that guitar and its six steel strings sing and sing and sing. But one night, when us brothers saw The Man Whose Guitar was a Fish standing outside our town’s hardware store with old Mister Higgerson there on the inside of there standing on his one leg that he still had left with him from back when he was getting shot at in the war, we saw that Uncle Fish, Uncle Guitar, The Man Whose Guitar was a Fish, he was on this one night just standing there doing nothing there but just standing there outside of old Mister Higgerston’s hardware store’s window: he wasn’t singing with his mouth, his guitar, it wasn’t humming with its six silvery strings, because our father’s brother, The Man Whose Guitar was a Fish, he didn’t have his guitar strapped or wrapped around the hunchback of his back. Hey, Uncle, us brothers called out to him when we saw him, our father’s brother, our Uncle Hank, this uncle of ours who wasn’t much of an uncle to us: he wasn’t, we didn’t think, much of a brother to the man who was our father — this man who, our mother sometimes said, to our father, our mother sometimes said that this uncle of ours was crazy — what our mother called this uncle was she called him Crazy Hank, because our mother, she sometimes said that our father’s brother had too much moon shine running through his veins. Us brothers, the first time we heard our mother say this about our father’s brother, our uncle Hank, we figured that this, that having the shine of the moon running through his veins, this had to be a good thing, that maybe this was what made our father’s brother’s guitar sound the way that it did when he strummed it with his hand and made its strings start up singing. But our father told us brothers that when our mother said that his brother had too much of the moon’s shine running through his veins, she wasn’t talking about the moon at night and its shining, which he knew us brothers loved the moon almost as much as we loved the river and the mud that held the muddy river in its place, not to mention the fish in this river that us brothers loved so much to catch. What our father told us, what our mother was really saying about our uncle, The Man Whose Guitar was a Fish, was that he was most of the time always drunk, that the whiskey he liked to drink, he liked to make it himself, down in the basement of the house where he lived with no one but himself. When we saw our uncle Fish, Uncle Guitar, The Man Whose Guitar was a Fish, standing out there out on the street’s corner without his guitar, we knew that something was up, that something had gone wrong. Hey, Joe, us brothers, we called out to our father’s brother. Hey, Uncle, we said. We did not say Uncle Hank. What we said was, Your guitar, we said. It’s gone, we said. Where’d it go? we then asked as if this guitar was a fish that could get up and get away, as if it was a dog that could walk out one night on a night with no moon or stars shining down and go to sleep in a place, across the rusted rails of a railroad track say, that was never meant for sleeping dogs to go to sleep there. Our father’s brother looked at us brothers with a look on his face that made us believe that, at first, he didn’t know that it was us. It’s us, we told him. It’s Jimmy, I said. And John, Brother said. And when we said this, these names, us brothers, we gave each of us brothers a look. There was this look that us brothers, we sometimes liked to look at each other with this look. It was a look that actually hurt the eyes of the brother who was doing the looking. Imagine that look. Now imagine the looks on us brothers’ faces when Uncle Guitar, Uncle Fish, The Man Whose Guitar was a Fish, looked at us brothers and he told us brothers that it, his guitar, he gave his guitar away. It was time, he told us, to let it go. So I threw it back, was what our father’s brother told us. Gave it to who? Let it go where? Threw it back how? This was what us brothers wanted to be told. Us brothers, we were this Joe’s closest thing he had to kin, to somebody who you’d give a thing like a guitar to if you were looking for someone to give away a guitar to. And so, us brothers, when we heard him say, To the river, us brothers, we both of us turned to face at each other — we did not have to say a word between us brothers of what we had to do next — and then the both of us brothers turned and we ran ourselves down to the river without saying to this uncle of ours a word or a sound that might sound like a goodbye. When we got down to the river, there was this sound there that, us brothers, we heard, and this sound that we heard, it was a sound that sounded better to our ears than the sound that could be called singing. Us brothers, we looked and we looked but we could not see where this sound was coming from — this sound that sounded better to us than a sound that could be called singing, this sound that was better than fish singing, us brothers, we figured that maybe this sound that the river was making wouldn’t mind another kind of a sound to be with it. So us brothers, we dropped down, into the mud, down at the river’s muddy edge, and out of this mud, us brothers, we made us a drum. This drum, made out of mud, us brothers, we made it the shape of the moon. We started beating it, with our boy hands, and making, with our hands, a sound come out from this drum that was made out of mud that made the sound that we heard sound out louder, so that this sound it seemed like to us that it was up closer now to us brothers, and when the moon came out of hiding from behind a sky that was muddy with night now, we could see, out on the river, our father’s brother’s guitar, it was shining in the moonlight there, it was floating down the river out there, it was, out there out on the river, it looked like to us like a raft made out of a steel that it would never, it could never, turn to rust. We watched it float down the river, and then, us brothers, we ran down the river after it, and as we ran, us brothers, we were the both of us brothers with our boy mouths singing. It was us brothers singing that made this guitar stand up on its neck and stop its floating down the river away. When it heard the sound of us brothers singing, this guitar, it started to float back, against the river’s current, it was swimming, this guitar was, like a fish, it was coming back to us. This guitar, like a fish, it swam right up to where us brothers were standing, right there on the river’s muddy bank, and then it flopped itself down into the mud right there at our feet. This guitar, this fish, us brothers, we picked it up like a fish and lifted it up out of the mud like a fish and we carried it like a fish up and away from the river. This fish, it was too big of a fish to fit inside any of our fish buckets. But we took it with us, this fish, back into town with us, this fish, to where our father’s brother, our uncle, Uncle Fish, Uncle Guitar, The Man Whose Guitar was a Fish, back to where we had left him standing, out front in the front of old Mister Higgerson’s hardware store window, and when he saw that it was us, when he saw us holding in our hands between us what it was we were holding up and holding out for him to take, what our father’s brother said to us was, What’s this? Us brothers, we shook our heads at this man who was our uncle. Not what, Uncle, we said. It’s who, we said. This, we said, and we held our hands up higher and closer in to our uncle, this here is your son. This here is our cousin. But us brothers, us brothers said, we’re gonna call him Brother. Brother because he is one of us. Our father’s brother, Joe, Hank, this man that our father did not call Brother, he shook his head at us no. Boys, he said, I know you two are brothers, he said, and yes, when he said this to us brothers, us brothers, we could both of us in the moon’s light see, that this uncle of ours did have on the inside of his mouth a tongue just like the both of us. I am not, our father’s brother said this much to us, a father. I am, he told us what it was that he was, just a man. And just like this, this man, our father’s brother, our uncle, call him Hank or Joe, Uncle Guitar or Uncle Fish, this man, is what we are trying to tell you, this man whose guitar, it was a fish — he fished his hand down inside his trouser pocket. When he pulled it back out, his hand, it was, this hand, a star-shaped knife. And even though us brothers tried to stop him from this doing, even though we sang out for him to stop, he raised back his hand, he brought this hand back forward, he cut off this fish’s head.