Raconteur

RACONTEUR

I only saw Jim Cobber take his fake eye out once and that was to make a point. Everybody was in the middle of a big shouting match over unions or some election thing and the next thing you know he kind of slaps himself in the head and gives everybody a green eyed stare from the middle of his palm. I must admit it got everybody's attention and he had the floor for a good five minutes.

We were working at a salmon plant in Nanaimo then. A giant factory, chock full of American guys like us between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six. Nobody talked much about why we didn't go, but every last one of us had tried eating a crate of bananas before the physical to screw up our blood pressure, or swallowing little aluminum foil balls to make the chest X-ray come out like our lungs were swiss cheese. When that stuff didn't work and our birthdays came out nice and too early on the lottery, we ended up out on Vancouver Island, trying like crazy to avoid those Life Magazine pictures with dead guys and mud.

The work up there wasn't too bad. They gave us nice job titles we could throw around in a pinch, but what we did was basically throw fish. We threw fish onto ice, conveyor belts, hooks, crates, you name it. I've been living back in Tacoma since President Ford let bygones be bygones, but every time I go to the market and that fish smell peppers my nostrils, I think of Jim Cobber and his stories.

He'd sit on a crate in the middle of mountains of glistening salmon and think out these stories all the time. We didn't really mind much humping the extra fish for him, because the longer he took to think them up, the better they were. "O.K. I got one. I got one," he'd say, like he'd been fishing in the back of his head for a while and was reeling it in. He never told anybody the story of what happened to his eye. Most of us guessed it was a lumberjack story of some kind, but Jack Russel's kid kept betting on something about a knife fight. We were all really curious, but just figured he'd get to it sooner or later.

I once told Jim that he should have gone. That he'd probably have gotten enough stories for two lifetimes. He shook his head slowly and shoved his hands into the pockets of his big Eskimo sweater. No, he'd met a guy who'd gone. A guy who told him stories about hiding, buried in the dirt with barefoot Viet Cong walking right on top of you and cold sweat dreams of being eaten by worms. "Stories like that," he said, "can go without tellin'. Least of all by me."

It was around that time that Jim seemed to start scrambling for stories, even made up ones, because the time it took to think them up got longer. "I once drove a car from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Los Angeles on one tank of gas, I kid you not," he said one day.

"I'll be impressed as soon as you tell me what kind of car," somebody said. Everybody slowed down for a second, to see if it was going to be worth putting their fish down.

"Karmann Ghia," Jim answered.

Everybody kept on walking with their fish and a few yelled, "No way." I tried to act like I was interested for him, but the fact was, Jim was really starting to come up empty. He'd just sit in the middle of his gaping mouthed, dead audience and watch us walk back and forth. Some of the other guys would start grumbling about his share of salmon chucking at that point. Then Jim would shake his head in this weird way, as if he was surprised that he'd told people about every single thing that ever happened to him.

I remember the last day I saw him because of the rain. Those big raindrops that make you get wet real fast pelted the roof of the plant like cherry bombs dancing on tin, and black moods oozed out of everybody, since cold, wet fish were jitterbugging all over the place and we were in no mood to dance. Jim had run out of material about two months before that day, and the men were getting tired of smiling and nodding and picking up his slack.

"I once saw a giant bull Orca," he said, "with a purple starfish on its back. Don't know how it got there. Did I tell you that one?"

"A million times," Jack Prosky said, wiping silver scales off his yellow slicker.

"I got followed by a bunch of bikers when I was driving through Texas," he said.

"Yup. And you went to a bar to call the cops and when you turned around the bikers were--"

"O.K., O.K., I told that one," Jim said. He looked at the wall for a second, took a breath and began again. "When I lived in San Francisco I met this slack rope walker named Ginny. Now, the slack rope is actually much harder to learn than the tightrope."

"Jim...Hey Jim, we've heard it" John Seales said, carrying a thirty pounder by, close enough to brush by Jim's arm as he passed.

"We've heard 'em all, pal," a new guy said. We all looked at him like he was out of line, but we had to admit he was right. We'd heard all of them.

Jim Cobber looked down at the cold, wet cement for a while and kicked a tail around with his insulated boots. His eyes weren't rambling around anymore, like he was trying to think of something, they were just focused on the fish tail, sliding back and forth on the floor. "Got a million of 'em," he said quietly, to nobody in particular, then he stood up with an overdone groan and started throwing fish. He picked the biggest ones and threw them from too far, so they would slam into the machinery and roll away. Some were getting damaged, but we all looked away, like it was none of our business. I picked up a pretty big one and for the first time since I'd started working there, the fish looked like it was staring back at me. Like I did something wrong. That fish and I stared each other down for three seconds before I threw it to the machine that would chop its head off.

Jim didn't come to work the next day. He picked up his check when nobody was around and before I moved out I heard that he had something going with the paper mill. Those paper guys make good money, so I shouldn't feel bad for him. I feel bad anyway. Sometimes I want to call him and tell him that I'm sorry about what happened that time. That it was just a bad day and we all have bad days, Lord knows. That day just happened to be everybody's bad day. But I'm in Tacoma and he's in Canada and I don't know where he lives. I work in a print shop now and it's a good job. Every time a new customer comes into the shop, the owner of the place has me tell the story about how Jim Cobber took his fake eye out that night. Their eyes light up and everybody thinks I lived the life of a pirate up in British Columbia, working in the wilderness with one-eyed fish chuckers. I tell the story about the Orca with the starfish on its back, too. I always feel bad, cause it didn't really happen to me, but you should see their faces as they listen.