Free Big Fish by Daniel Wallace Page A

Jesus, a favorite topic of Mr. Templeton’s, for it was his belief that the crucifixion was an especially dastardly act, seeing as how Pontius Pilate and Jesus had been roommates at Oxford. In this light Pontius Pilate had really done the Lord dirty. No more mention was made of the marriage the rest of that afternoon—Mr. Templeton, in fact, seemed to forget why they were there at all—and as dusk came on it was time to leave.
    The three of them stood, the men shook hands again, and they walked past the closed bedroom door and slowed there. Sandra looked at her father, who shook his head.
    â€œNot a good day,” he said. “Best not disturb her.”
    And so they left, the two of them, waving at the old man through the darkening light, and him waving back at them and pointing, with a child’s delight, toward the starry sky.

His Three Labors
    B ecause it was a great metropolis full of hope, my parents moved to Birm­ingham, Alabama, where my father sought his fortune. Word of his great strength, intelligence, and perseverance had spread even this far, and yet his youth was such that my father knew he must perform many great labors before he assumed his rightful place.
    His first labor was to work as a veterinarian’s assistant. As a veterinarian’s assistant, his most important responsibility was to clean out the dog kennels and cat cages. Every morning when he arrived, the cages and kennels would be nearly filled with feces. Some of it would lie on the paper he’d placed down the night before, but still more would be smeared on the walls, and some of it on the very animals themselves. My father cleaned this mess up every morning and every evening. He did it until the cages shone, until you could have eaten a meal off the surface of the floor, so spotless and clean had he left it. But it would only take a few seconds for it to get soiled again, and this was the job’s terrible Sisyphean frustration: a dog might look straight at you, just as you were locking him into his lovely, newly cleaned cage, and shit.
    H IS SECOND LABOR WAS as a sales clerk in the lingerie section of a department store downtown, called Smith’s. The fact that he had been stationed in lingerie seemed a cruel joke, and indeed, he suffered greatly from the sassy comments he heard from the men in other departments—especially from the men in sportswear. But he persevered, and eventually won the trust of the women who regularly shopped at Smith’s, and in fact came to be preferred to the women who worked with him. They valued his keen eye.
    But there was one woman who was never able to accept my father as a sales clerk. Her name was Muriel Rainwater. She had lived in Birmingham all her life, had two husbands, both dead, no children at all, and money beyond counting to get through before she passed on herself. She was almost eighty years old then, and, much like a tree, each year had seen her girth expand until she’d become monumental; still, she was quite vain. While she didn’t care to be much thinner than she was, she certainly wanted to look much thinner, and thus often visited the lingerie department at Smith’s searching for the latest in girdles.
    And so every month Mrs. Rainwater marched down to Smith’s and sat down in one of the large, overstuffed chairs provided for its customers, and, without a word, merely nodded toward a clerk, and that clerk duly brought her the latest in girdle wear. But that clerk was never Edward Bloom.
    This was clearly a snub. But the truth was that Edward was not particularly fond of Mrs. Rainwater, either. No one was—the way her feet smelled of moth balls, her hair like burnt fabric, and the way her arms shook when she pointed at something she wanted. But the fact that she insisted on not allowing him to serve her made her, to Edward, the most desirable customer in the store. He made it his goal to one day wait on Muriel Rainwater.
    To this end