THE TWO FREDS

I once had two little gold fish, who swam happily in a small tank in my kitchen window. As I couldn’t tell one from the other, they were both called “Fred”. When I entered the room and said, “Hi, Fred!” they would both come to the front of the tank, wag their tails; and, I liked to think, mouthed: “Hello Bruce.” My nephew, a cynic if ever there was one, suggested they were actually saying, “Break the glass, we’ll take our chances on the tiles.” But I prefer my version, and they are after all my fish. They’re not fancy fish by any means. In fact they cost only twenty-five cents at the local aquarium, where the proprietor keeps a huge tank full of what he calls ”feeder fish”. These critters are earmarked as part of the dietary regimen for fancier specimens that require live food.

But I like the Cinderella Story of snatching two feeder fish from this gruesome tank, and putting them into my mine, which though more modest in size, is nicely appointed with three attractive shells and a lovely plant. At first I was concerned that there was not enough room in my tank, but a fish aficionado reassured me that goldfish have a very short attention span, and that once around the bowl, it’s a whole new deal.

On occasion, I have had to leave town for several weeks at a time, and have in the past paid a neighbor’s son ten dollars a week to feed my little charges. But that seemed economically unsound: ten dollars for twenty-five cent fish! So I came up with the idea of bringing them back to the aquarium and throwing them into the feeder tank. And on my return home, I would pay fifty cents for another couple of goldfish, who for all I knew were the original Freds. It may sound like prejudice, but to me, they all look the same. And I would set up house for them in my tank, and serve them frozen shrimp twice a day. Life was good for the two Freds.

One Sunday my neighbor invited me over for brunch to celebrate the birthday of his eldest daughter by his first marriage. This was an awkward situation for me, as earlier in the week I had had to report him to the police. We in the neighborhood suspected that he was dealing drugs (a suspicion later confirmed when the narcs found a meth lab in his garage). I tried to maintain a friendly relationship with him, since I didn’t want him to think that my reporting about his drug dealings was in any way personal. On the morning of the brunch, I was given a tour of his home, and he showed me a very large aquarium, which contained a fish about the size of a human hand. He called it an Amazon red devil (a sub-species of Piranha, I would venture), and the fish lived up to its diabolical name by charging the front of the tank as we entered the room and leaping out of the water when he held his hand over it. Not surprisingly, the red devil turned out to require five live goldfish a day.

So when I left town this last time, I had the ingenious idea of giving the two Freds to the red devil as a sort of neighborly gesture. My neighbor Florence, who raises Water Spaniels, was horrified at the thought. She likened it to giving away a dog, and didn’t speak to me for a week. But I figured that the damn fish were going to end up as lunch anyway, so why not let their little lives go to some purpose which might weigh in my favor should I be called to a drug trail. So on the morning of my departure I left them, with a friendly note, in a large plastic bottle at my neighbor’s front door.

When I returned, I asked him how the Amazon red devil had enjoyed the two Fred’s. His jaw clenched visibly. Apparently he had tossed the two Freds into the red devil’s tank that very morning. The two Freds, never having met anyone they didn’t like, swam straight up to the Amazon red devil, who responded to their gracious act by eating the face off the first Fred and then swallowing him whole. Undeterred by a full stomach, the brute turned his attention to the second Fred who had stopped dead in his tracks at the disappearance of the first Fred. Then the red devil ate the face off the second Fred and attempted to swallow the rest of him. Alas, the Amazon red devil choked on the second Fred! And in a hideous twist of fate, $175.00 worth of rare tropical fish soon lay belly up in the tank. With the second Fred’s tail sticking out of his mouth.

Things have not been quite the same with the neighbor. Our morning “hellos” are short and crisp. We avoid eye contact. Needless to say, there have been no further invitations to brunch. He and his family departed one night without so much as a by-your-leave. Soon after the cops arrived, and discovered the drug paraphernalia. Looking back on the incident, I feel a touch of remorse that the two Freds gave their lives for naught. And I have jettisoned the fish tank and with it, the whole concept of two Freds.

© Bruce Gray