The Duel of the Fish

There once were two men who had to duel using fish.

It was not easy to figure out how to do.  They were the miserable butt of jokes for months as they tried out and discarded various fanciful notions.

Particularly miserable was the man who had been challenged.  He and the challenger had both been pretty worked up about whatever it was, so he accepted the challenge through clenched teeth and then drew himself up to announce his choice of weapon.  He wanted fish spears, the barbed nasty little things.  He drew himself up and said, “FISH [dramatic pause]” then one guy there snorted and everyone around burst out laughing, big honking laughs, and no one heard him say “spears.”  They just would not shut up with the laughter, by the time he could make himself clear it sounded like he was making excuses and everyone agreed it was too late.  He was so angry he challenged some of them to a duel but they just laughed him off.

At the time the challenger was furious at the man who said fish.  He thought the man must have done it on purpose, he was in no mood to make allowances (you rarely are when you fight a duel), and he wanted to call the whole thing off as a mockery.  But everyone advised him he had to.  They insisted solemnly that it would clean impinge on his personal honor to back out now.

You never believe in society quite so much as when everyone you meet knows all about your affairs and spontaneously coordinates to keep you the butt of the joke.  

It wasn’t just their seconds, though certainly their seconds milked it.  They had to replace their seconds many times.

Who knew so many people had a talent for light comic doggerel?

The King–who had nothing better to do, he worked hard at having nothing better to do–ruled they could not use frozen fish.  Fish, he said, are paradigmatically alive.  If gentlemen want to use frozen fish to fight, they should say so.  After all, he droned on, while his courtiers fought back the giggles, if gentlemen said they were fighting with pistols, no one would think they meant frozen ones.

They thought about releasing piranhas or something at each other while both standing in a pond.  But the seconds and other leading lights called in to consult said that the men wouldn’t be wielding the fish as weapons so it wouldn’t count.  Unless, one second proposed, very straight faced, the men wanted to try to train the fish . . .

I think it was the same second who proposed that they saddle sharks and joust them at each other.  Once everyone had laughed themselves silly pretending to take the idea seriously, they discarded it.  But the idea of guiding or harnessing sharks had legs–so to speak.  What if you had the shark suspended in a tank on a remote control wheeled base or something that the two would then try to drive each towards the opponent?  This sounded like a lot of fun and garnered a bunch of helpful suggestions . . . but the King said no.  After all, if gentlemen said they were fighting with swords, no one would think they meant swords mounted on ATVs etcetera etc.  Mechanical means of control only.

OK, so what if they used mechanical means?  The ever helpful crowd of seconds and interested onlookers caught fire with the idea.  A system of levers and pulleys and hinged scaffolding with clever counterweights so one man could move a shark around.  An apparatus to flow water over the gills.  A sprayer to keep the rest of animal wet.  This was fun, and they had got quite far in their planning before anyone realized the rube goldberg device would be so bulky that it would be impossible to get to the man operating it.

The two duellists were themselves almost after-thoughts.  It would be nice to say they came together in their shared misery; they did, but only by fits and starts.  The truth is they got into raging screaming matches at first.  Until they realized how much their friends and neighbors enjoyed seeing two guys yelling impotently at each other without being able to challenge each other to a duel because they were already fighting a duel.  Delicious irony, like delicious food, is much more enjoyable for the diner than for the source.

Eventually everyone agreed–except the duellists, but no one thought their opinion mattered at this point, and indeed it did not–that they would duel using pike.  The crowd of interested persons still got to design a little framework to suspend the pike by, along with an apparatus to bring water pass their gills, although in an extremely reduced form.

The morning of, the two men came, miserable and naked–you can’t wear clothes to a pike fight or where’s the risk, pikes aren’t sharks after all–with plenty of ostensible supporters for each yelling more and more ridiculous taunts and boasts at the others.  There were vendors and everyone was having the time of their lives except for the two naked men.  They each had a long pole with a sort of wicker basket suspended from it and a couple of helpers pumping water through the hoses and carrying the hoses around when the men dipped or swung the pole.  The sprayers keeping the whole area moist were extremely enthusiastic.

After a lot of flailing around and absurd maneuvring, one of the men managed to get himself slightly bit on the arm.  Honor was satisfied, everyone declared.  Oddly enough, the loser, the man who was bit, got carried off on the shoulders of a crowd of cheering enthusiasts just the same as the winner.  If anything, the loser’s crowd was bigger.  The winner was actually a bit angry that he hadn’t got bit himself, after all, all that trouble and then nothing to show for it . . . but he had learned to be philosophic by now.

Neither of the men embraced their fame and wrote a book or put on a touring fish fighting exhibition or anything of the kind.  They weren’t Americans.

There were a few fish fighting carnivals young men arranged in the years after.  No duels, just for fun.