Fish Out of Water By Christopher Green

I roll across the Mason-Dixon in a car

stained with rock salt and disuse the day before

Thanksgiving, and back at the apartment, up

North, it's already dipped twice into the single

digits. I'm still picturing the place in vicious

tableau: a gaggle of Midwesterners huddled

around great big steel oil drums with fires

popping inside, everybody wearing checkered

flannel jackets and those hats with the ear flaps.

The men all have bristling mustaches; the women

are swollen with the next chubby, screaming kid.

Down here, though, through Texas,

Mississippi, the Georgia seaboard, the Florida

panhandle, and into the great Heart of Dixie, it

gets balmy. It's downright subtropical. I have to

stop at a Sunoco for sunglasses (sunglasses!), and

the woman at the counter purrs at me, “How you

doin' today, hon?” The sound of her is all thick

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and syrupy-sweet, every word like a pie left out to

cool on a windowsill.

I smile and slip the shades on, the

wraparounds that friends' fathers would wear

over the grill when I was a kid. I ask how I look.

Like Jeff Gordon, she tells me, and for some

reason, maybe just because I'm so awash with

homesickness, I take this as a compliment.

The hills level off into great sprawling fields

of Southern Pines as I go, and I'm taken aback by

all that green, by the little fireworks going off on

every branch. As the road spills out in front of me

over sun-soaked farmland I have to roll the

window down to stem the sweat. It is seventy-

eight degrees outside, warm even by Southern

standards this time of year, bright as a stage light

even with the shades on: the great wide Tanning

Bed of America.

My grandmother's house is a modern

behemoth set a hundred feet back into coastal

Alabama forest, and it teems with silence. A great

wooden porch stretches the length of two sides,

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and by the front door is the cushioned rocker I

used to fall asleep in every Sunday afternoon.

There are no exhaust fumes, no oily spatter of

polluted rain on my windshield. I'm in love with

the smell of salt and the sound of my own

breathing, and I've only just got here.

So while somewhere up in Ohio, Michigan,

Pennsylvania, Indiana some kid is shoveling

tarnished, hard-packed snow, some dog is pissing

icicles, some colleague of mine is traveling

beneath a great big suicide-gray sky into a

building made of cold steel and resentment, while

all this is going on, I am eating a thick slice of

pecan pie. I am drinking sweet tea. I am on the

beach, reading the biography of Hunter

Thompson and planning my next seafood dinner

in the back of my mind. I am steeped in my roots,

and there is a glow beneath my skin that hasn't

been there since I left.

On a Saturday morning I awake to an open

window, leaves like rushing water, the click of the

AC as it roars to life. I walk outside on dream-

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light feet, kneel down in the grass, and bury

myself. It's St. Augustine. Not the coarse, spindly

weeds from up North, not the stuff that can make

you bleed, but a soft carpet of life, vibrant and

warm. I want this color to be a part of me. It's not

enough to feel the blades on my lips, across my

cheek. I want to knit a blanket from them and

wrap it around my heart. I settle back on my legs

and stare up at the canopy, shining down on me

like the cover of a card in some Christian

bookstore in Muncie, Indiana.

And then, as quickly as I came, I am gone.

And the laughing winds of the Great Lakes are

swallowing me up again, like quicksand, like a

slow and stealthy resignation, like a dirty mouth.

Back home, in the frozen North, I wrap my

windows in plastic. I sleep in my socks. I spend

hours shoveling the driveway and then listen to

the angry slurp of tires in an icy trench. The cold

waits outside my window like a vampire, wanting

my flesh. In the morning I put on gloves and

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earmuffs and dive into the breathless air. I cross a

purgatorial expanse to get to the office, where the

only things to touch are frigid metal and

Styrofoam and my own closed eyelids. The

carpets are like fuzzy tile. The windows are

frosted and dark from years of smog. No one

smiles.

I am falling apart with sadness here. I have

frostbite in my chest. I want tea and sunshine, I

want people who tell me hello, who wish me a

good day. I want to die, because no matter where

I go, it's got to be warmer.

At about two in the afternoon, six days after

the world put its shroud back on, it occurs to me

that this calls for a desperate plan.

This plan must be executed with great

finesse, or not at all. This plan is something that

will get me locked up and in a straight jacket if

I'm not extremely careful. This plan, in fact, will

almost certainly ruin my life no matter how I hack

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6

it. I love this plan. Just the thought of it gets me

through my day.

On my way home, I stop at Wal-Mart for

twenty-eight potted plants, two cans of kidney

beans, a bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce, a Jimmy

Buffet album, and three boxes of sweet tea. After

that, I stop at the liquor store for a fifth of

bourbon.

At the house, I turn the heat up to eighty

and put on the Buffet with the volume maxed. As

I'm placing the sixteenth plant, drink in hand, my

door explodes with furious pounding. Behind it

stands an obese, red-faced man in an Ohio State

sweatshirt that doesn't fit him. I'm not sure if he's

screaming because he's angry or because my

music is loud enough to set off car alarms, but in

either case I tell him I'll turn it down and then

shut the door and go back to my plants. They're

not very pretty, to tell the truth; it is November,

after all. But they're green, and that's all I'm really

looking for in this, my hour of greatest need.

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7

I've got a book of recipes I bought at

Borders, but it doesn't have much of anything I'm

looking for, so I call my mother to get all of hers,

especially the stuffed shrimp, the jambalaya, and

(sweet Christ!) red beans and rice, which is

naturally what the beans are for. I don't have any

Conecuh County sausage in my freezer, just a

cylinder of ground turkey the color of brain

matter, but I'm in no position to be choosy. I

throw it all in a pan and start belting out

“Cheeseburger in Paradise.” I make so much noise

that I don't even hear Sweatshirt Guy trying to

bust down my door a second time.

At the office, no one bothers to ask me why

I'm wearing jeans and sandals and a green tee

shirt that says “Pass the Buck-et” above a picture

of a fried drumstick. At least, not with their

words. They give me these really sour,

incredulous glares, but they always do that

anyway, so I pretend like it's got nothing to do

with the fact that my feet are up on my desk and

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my computer's wallpaper is a picture of bikini

girls on a Gulf Shores beach.

If I were older they'd say I'm having a mid-

life crisis. As it is, I'm still just young enough that

they can call it rebellion. And that's fine, because I

suppose that's what it is. Except what I'm

rebelling against is me. I let myself go native. I

gave in to the nagging desire to look away when I

pass someone in the street. I started eating

fucking cod. But no more!

I'm teaching Freshman Composition II this

semester. We're learning about how to write an

analytical essay. We're learning about intentional

fallacy. Every morning I come in and they're

sitting there like thirty copies of McMurphy at the

end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, half a

brain down. Before I came back, I had never

noticed just how much this place reminded me of

a sanitarium, but this week, the peach walls are

looking a lot more white.

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Class, I announce, there is a change in your

syllabus we need to discuss. I'll be blunt: the fact

is, you've been getting a Yankee's education from

a card-carrying Southerner, and I assure you, the

shame of this fact has not escaped me. Starting

this week, I expect every student to present

himself and herself in my classroom on every

class day with the following supplies: one bottle of

Corona, one shrimp cocktail, and a quarter-ounce

of Dixie Duchess marijuana. Any student who

takes it upon himself to bring an item not

appearing on this list will face the appropriate

consequences. So help me God, if I see one

highlighter in the perimeter of my domain I will

react with the most terrible swiftness. You may be

sure of that.

I assign them a paper on how to make

either key lime pie, pan-fried catfish, or fried

oyster strips. Mom is missing some recipes.

The department chair is not immediately

forthcoming with her approval of the new

curriculum. In her office, she seethes with a quiet,

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Nurse Ratchet-like anger. She talks low, but claws

deep grooves into her desk. When asked to defend

myself I merely reply Ma'am, I must regain my

honor. I have suffered a dreadful loss of honor for

which I intend to pay my penance. You will excuse

me, but this is not the department's concern.

The chair, however, disagrees, and so I

offer her the only solution I feel has been left to

us: pistols at dawn. At first she is reluctant, but,

seeing that my will cannot be broken by any lesser

means, she accepts at last. The vice-provost will

serve as her second, while I choose a young

student named Jeremiah, a bright kid from

Kansas who has seen the wisdom in my actions

early on. The field of honor is the north quad,

being the only appropriately-sized arena with any

semblance of flora. I simply cannot abide a duel

on concrete.

The following morning is a bitter one.

Anticipation and frost hang from every surface. I

meet my adversary on the field, and am shocked

to discover that the vice-provost, whom I have not

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previously met, is in fact Sweatshirt Guy. This

only serves to heighten my demand for

satisfaction, as the forces of the Yankee Bastards

are clearly lining up against me now, fixing

bayonets like the regiment of Joshua

Chamberlain.

Dueling pistols are not in ready supply in

the Midwest, so a pair has been overnighted from

Atlanta, arriving in a rich oak box lined with

velvet the color of a Southern sky just after

sundown. We stand on either side of it, my

opponent and I, listening patiently to the terms of

the contest. Jeremiah's breath expands and

dissolves like blood underwater. We take our

weapons, turn, pace, turn, aim. The sun shimmers

on my barrel. I have never been so happy.

Students in the halls of nearby dorms jerk

at the sound of our matching reports.

The department chair lies wounded. I

myself am unharmed; to my shuddering relief,

her own bullet has widely missed its mark. The

match is decided, but there are grim faces all

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around. It is clear to me already that in the North,

such challenges do not carry the same weight. My

suspicions are confirmed when the Dean of Arts

and Sciences himself arrives in my office the

following day to inform me that my services as an

instructor are no longer needed at the university.

Back at the house, I take comfort in the

sweltering heat and the jangly Buffet guitar. I dive

into my mattress, breathe deep, and bask in the

glorious pride of risking myself for my homeland.

After several hours of sleep, I rise, water my

plants, make myself a drink, and sit out on my

deck in sandals and shorts. It is December,

twenty-two degrees, but there is a fire inside me

now, hot as a leather car seat in August, fine as

the sand on a Pensacola beach.

A few students, Jeremiah among them, are

at my door in the morning, offering their praise

and their sorrow. I take them inside and offer

them tea, which they politely decline, and then I

show them the pistols, safely in their velvet beds.

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They are elegant and menacing, trimmed with

brushed brass. They still smell of gunpowder.

Look well, I tell my last remaining pupils, for this

is the past. This is loyalty, and honor, and

accountability, and faith. This is my home.

And then I shut the box.

The weeks pass quickly, and my savings are

limited. The heating bill, I am sure, is what finally

leads me to the streets, to the arms of a Northern

winter. I can hear her, shrill in the early hours of

morning, when I wake to the violent hands of a

store owner or beat cop. I spend my days in front

of Four Fronds, a neon-wreathed bar for aging

Parrotheads, beneath the branches of an

enormous electric palm tree. At dusk, I pack up

my pistols, a necklace of seashells, and my last

potted plant, which I have affectionately named

Scarlett, and huddle beneath the window of an

elderly Cuban couple who insist on the same vinyl

record of boleros every night at 9:30.

At first, my students come for brief visits,

bearing steaming bowls of grits and the

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occasional moon pie. On the last day that I will

ever see him, Jeremiah brings me a bottle of

Aristocrat vodka, with no explanation as to where

he acquired it. “Alabama's number-one seller!” he

proudly recites, and I am so touched, so

overcome, that I throw my arms around him and

choke him with my unwashed scent, and weep

with abandon into his clean, pressed polo.

But youth's fidelity, they say, is a fickle

hound, driven to wander. A few weeks pass, and

the visits cease. I am left to the ghostly traces of

“Why Don't We Get Drunk (and Screw)” wafting

from the Four Fronds doorway, like the lingering

scent of a lover as she speeds away in another

man's car. The other children I can handle—their

affection was passing, mercurial—but it is the loss

of Jeremiah, who so embraced my teachings, that

saddens me to distraction. I mourn him, as I

might mourn a son.

February winds to a close. The cold deepens

to an abyss. I survive only through indoor public

drinking fountains and the refuse behind Long

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John Silver's. Scarlett dies a lonely death while I

sleep. In a moment of final, wrenching injustice, I

am forced to pawn the pistols for a pair of army

boots, three packs of cigarettes, and a bottle of

Southern Comfort. I feel that my torment has

reached its absolute crescendo.

The last memory before the hospital is of a

sliver of sky bleeding through the crack between

two buildings, as I stare up from the alleyway, my

chest cobwebbed and aching. I imagine that the

buildings are so tall I can see stars in daylight, but

this is only fever dream. I tease the last drops of

liquor from the bottom of the bottle, like a

canteen, like my last memories of home, then pass

into comatose sleep, cigarette still hanging from

my pale, chapped lips.

What at first is white sand resolves into

bedsheets and billowing curtains—a hospital bed.

The doctor tells me that I have something vaguely

life threatening, and I say yes, I know, I diagnosed

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it months ago: a terrible case of Ohio. He doesn't

seem amused.

The two weeks in that bed are a blur of

hockey games on the little swinging television

over my bed and the rounded vowels from my

chubby-cheeked nurse, who will not, despite my

gravest insistence, give me back the pot that once

housed Scarlett. She's a big, pasty woman, with

hips like the cab of a freight truck and the cold,

searing eyes of a Baptist minister. She doesn't like

when I complain about the lack of seafood in the

hospital's regimen. She tells me to eat my turkey

loaf.

I get along better with the black night

nurse, Deneice, though I'm usually sleeping when

she's around. On the nights I'm up we watch I

Love Lucy and she sneaks me little dainty

margaritas from the bar across the street. She's a

big woman, too, but in that deliberate way, in

defiance of the code. She has a raspy laugh that

makes her breasts tremble like large, frightened

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animals. She looks over her glasses at me when I

ask for another drink.

The days stretch on. The cold is back on the

outside now, but still hungry. The sky is white as

lies. There's a little rotating space heater on the

window beside me, brought in by somebody who

got tired of hearing me complain about the

temperature. Every time it comes back toward

me, I try to imagine myself somewhere else, like

back in my grandmother's yard, with a face full of

St. Augustine grass. It's tough with no green in

the room. Just white. Everything is white. White

paint, white snow, white skin. There's no color in

this place, except Deneice and my own dreams. I

lie in bed in the long early mornings when my

fever keeps me up, with only the whir of the space

heater for company, and wonder how the shape of

home can change, how you can paint a new face

on it and still call it the same old name.

I have no answers. I fall asleep an hour

after the sun comes up, right after Deneice brings

me key lime pie for breakfast.

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18

At the end of the two weeks, the

department chair comes to visit. She looks

forbidding in her modest blue blouse, in the

doorway with her hands folded in front of her. I

can see her brain through her nostrils when they

flare at me.

I ask her, with a voice straining to maintain

its confidence, how that arm is feeling.

She says nothing. She sails to the other end

of the room and sits in a chair that faces the foot

of my bed. She does not cross her legs.

Just a little joke, I say. To what do I owe the

pleasure?

She offers me my old job back.

It will be on a tentative basis, of course.

Despite my recent behavior, my service as an

instructor was valuable to the department, and if I

can only promise no more outbursts, they will

consider reinstating me. We had enjoyed, after all,

a very cordial working relationship prior to my

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return from Thanksgiving break. There is a

shortage of qualified teachers in the area, and

they would appreciate it if I could return to my

position with my former respect for

professionalism.

I will not, I assure her, will not dishonor

myself in such a way.

Will I dishonor myself by not paying my

bills, then? she replies, so calmly that it chills my

skin with rage. I owe the hospital quite a sum of

money after my... sabbatical. Without steady work

I will be back in the alley before too long, no

doubt cradling another specimen of deceased

flora. I need food, heat, a sense of purpose. I

could return to a sales cubicle, of course, or to the

back of some brightly colored plastic hut of a

restaurant where the grease hangs like humidity

in the air and no one speaks in language of more

than three syllables.

But I don't want that. I am a teacher. That

is my trade, that is what I know. I can come back

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to it. And I'll only have to be a little more

judicious about what I choose to teach.

The room is silent in that way that only

fluorescent light in winter can be. The department

chair's nostrils stare me down. She smiles, a slow

thing that spreads across her like an oil spill. I

think about palm trees, and sand, and the

splintered wood of a pier, boiled by sun and

saltwater, against the palm of my hand. I think

about green and blue. And then I look down at my

hospital gown. I am all white now.

I sigh, like the last dying draft at the rim of

the hurricane, and the department chair, still

smiling, rises and leaves the room. Outside, it is

snowing for the fourth time today. It covers the

leaves like sheets of canvas over old forgotten

furniture. Spring won't come for weeks.

Christopher Green

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Christopher Green currently lives and works in

Cincinnati. His writing experience includes corporate

copywriting and editing, critical essays for the MA in

literature, and numerous short stories and screenplays. His

plans are to earn the MFA and to publish both literary

fiction and nonfiction, as well as teach writing at the

college level. He maintains a fiction blog

at http://arsmelodia.tumblr.com.