Into Woods

by Bill Roorbach

  During a long ten minutes the medics get his neck immobilized and his blood-pressure pants in place and get him on a stretcher and into an ambulance. On the way into Harlem Hospital he suddenly sits up, opens his blank eyes, rips the IV from his arm, rips the oxygen mask from his face. Then he falls back, dead. I am right there, crouching.

  Away! Go away, O Death!

  I wrote the article, got it in on time; I forget which day in May, except that it was the same day 7 Days Magazine folded. I felt bereft, guilty, as if my story had killed the magazine somehow. And as if the magazine’s death might kill my supposedly budding journalism career. So it goes. But the story ended up elsewhere. New York Magazine, if you want to know. October 1990. No problem. “A Day in the Life of Death.” Five in the morning to midnight, Good Friday. The only real trouble I had was that the hospital wouldn’t verify the murdered boy’s death. I don’t blame them. Death looks bad. But because I couldn’t verify, the fact checkers at New York wouldn’t let me say it.

  But here I will: he died. That kid died. I knew it then and I know it now. And I see his lean form and hear his humming when I least wish to. And no matter how many times I dream that dream I don’t learn anything useful from him at all. Nothing. And nothing from the motorcycle crash or the fat man whose heart burst in spindrift or the little man who danced himself to death in the Preacher’s busy bar, nothing at all from the half year of study and reporting that came later. What was I doing, anyway? What did I think I’d learn, staring at death so hard, so shamelessly?

  Death exacts awe, it’s true, and the awful demands a certain amount of looking away. Perhaps the looking away has something to do with the privacy Larry Vignoble kept talking about. And maybe such denial is a mistake, as Kübler-Ross says, a flaw of the modern Western character. But then again, isn’t denial a survival tactic in itself? Why live with fate as with some depressed and depressing lover when there are girls in bikinis walking by and boys with flat stomachs?

  Today a funeral in the rain at O.O. Olson’s. I rock the piano and look out the window. Before long here the trees will bud and leaf and I won’t see it so clearly anymore. Anyway. Someone rich—the lot is full of Mercedes parked in the rain on wet pavement as on the surface of some black pond.

  Vortex

  Mike and I, what can I say, we liked to fish. We might argue about music or compete over women, but fish, fish we could talk about that summer, especially bluefish. We’d climb in my truck and roar out to Squibnocket Beach five in the morning and fish with the tide. We’d get on the ferry to Chappaquiddick after a shaky gig in Edgartown and spend the night on the beach flinging lures and drinking hard and talking fish, if not catching them. We are both second brothers in families with three boys, for what that might be worth to you in understanding our troubled and blessed alliance. I’m ten years older than he, for what that might add. And this happy story is years ago, going on two decades, is set back when we’d known each other ten years already—I’d known him from a teen—back when time and place and whatever other hidden stuff hadn’t intervened and let us drift apart.

  Martha’s Vineyard, late afternoon tide approaching. All day indoors practicing for a gig later in the week and we’re both thinking about fishing, no matter how hard Adam hits the drums, no matter the chord changes Jon’s calling out, no matter if our mouths are singing and our fingers are playing, no matter what, Mike and I are thinking fish.

  And we’re both low-key getting into my old truck when rehearsal is done. Our surf rods are already back in the bed of the bombish F-100 (since retired), where they do live. Our reels—representing our life savings—are on the rods. Our bait buckets are back there and our tackle boxes, such as they are. We say see-you-laters to the rest of the boys in the band, get in the truck just like going downtown—cool as wild cucumbers—we don’t want a crowd coming with us today. Those other guys aren’t serious. Those other guys—fuck ’em—will want to leave before the fish come in. Or they’ll complain if there aren’t any fish. They don’t really know what we know, what fishing really is: that peaceful, soulful bump in your chest and your eyes watching the water. Afternoon tide is so nice and quiet, and you might catch a fish for the party at Robertini’s tonight. You might. You don’t know. We stop in Oak Bluffs for Bobby Robertini, who’s also serious, but he says, “Nah.” He’s been on the island two weeks already and hasn’t caught a fish, is losing his edge, we like to say. He’s getting spoiled by the family boat. We don’t make fun or press him, because more is not merrier, not in Lobsterville anyway.

  We roar up-island, catching views out over the ocean, talking fish. I take the big right onto the Lobsterville road, fighting that wheel and changing those gears, and we cruise, watching that water. We’ve caught the tide. We’ve caught it all right! I park the bomb at Lobsterville, Lobsterville nothing but the end of a road across the inlet from Menemsha, which is a real fishing port, a genuine seaside village, beset by tourists, protected by money. But Lobstahville, Lobstahville is just a road ending in a steep ramp to deep water and signs saying Road Ends Here so drunken summer dinks and certain senators don’t dunk their Caddies. There’s a dock there and a few small boats from Gay Head but mostly dinghies floating in the little pond that makes a bit of harbor. But that’s it. It’s no ville.

  And we’re just slowly getting our tackle out—no rush—when we become aware of the gulls and terns wheeling in the sky over where the jetty would be. We spy that enormous cloud of terns and gulls and just grab our gear and run, two guys trundling over the dunes, two big guys, sunburned and freckled and unkempt, one in sneakers, one barefoot. The day is cool, high, heavy clouds in crisp blue, heavy wind, onshore. The Lobsterville jetty when we get there is empty but for one fisherman, and this one lone man is fighting a fish, his pole bent almost double. Whitecaps lash the rocks. Mike and I, oh Jesus, we run faster, struggling in the deep sand. Laughing gulls swoop and fall into the heavy chop around the head of the jetty, picking off baitfish. A cheering line of big herring gulls and black-backed gulls at water’s edge, sated, throw their heads back, yelping and chortling continuously. The terns hover aloft, tireless, wheeling and diving, smacking the water, carrying off sand eels. My heart leaps in my chest.

  Mike and I, we skip carelessly from boulder to boulder on the jetty, because suddenly we’ve seen the furious boiling of a great school of feeding bluefish and the frantic, churning, sometimes flying, escapes of schools of their prey: tinker mackerel, for sure. Sand eels, too. Flat-sided, flashing herring, like stainless steel brooches moving light speed through the very surface of the water.

  “Everywhere!” the lone fisherman shouts in the wind. His cap says Martha’s Vineyard in neat gold letters. He’s lanky and kindly, a generous soul. He seems real glad to have folks to share his luck, and he talks oddly in excitement: “Bloody ding-dong everywhere!”

  Mike and I, we hurry; the blues could be gone in an instant. High tide about to turn, the water rough, good breeze, whitecaps breaking over the jetty and washing our pants cuffs, the sun two hours from setting into the Elizabeth Islands, those big clouds shooting in the stratosphere, keeping their distance from each other, from the earth below. The world is all sound and light and splashing fish.

  I impatiently watch my thick stupid hands push fourteen-pound monofilament through loops and turns, careful not to hurry and make a weak knot. When the steel leader is finally secure, I clip an orange plastic Atom on. I don’t have a green-backed Atom to match the bait mackerel, but we are after bluefish, not stripers or bonito, and bluefish won’t care.

  Mike? Mike is already casting a Hopkins, a very simple dimpled chunk of flashing stainless steel with a hank of deer hair at the hook end. He barks, “I’m on!” the second his lure hits the water. His pole bends deeply, as the fish fights to stay where she is. Oh, Mike’s pole bends and the line shoots out, reel singing, as the bluefish turns, dives, makes a run.

  I fire my Atom out over the water. The Atom, a thick, buoyant cylinder of pressed polystyrene
with two sets of treble hooks, imitates a wounded and struggling baitfish. I reel it in fast, jerking the rod tip to make the lure pop and jump and waggle. Almost immediately a bluefish appears behind it, catching up, breaking the water, all mouth and fins. I crank faster yet, as fast as I can, feeling something of the terror those tinker mackerel must feel, fleeing. The blue swims up beside the lure, turns his head, and with the slightest pause for inspection—slam!—hits it with a splashing, ice-cold leap and chomp. The fish turns now and sinks to carry its prize away. My long surf rod bends like it’s made of grasses. The fish stops. I freeze. The two of us stay like that, pure tension at opposite ends of the taut line. After a full, round minute, I pull up a little to test the fish, to see if he’s still there, and, man, he takes off, stripping line.

  Mike has managed to tire his own fish, has it in close to the jetty, in amid the undulating seaweed. He holds his rod up high with one hand, holds the net in the water, slowly draws the tired beast toward him. How often we’ve lost fish at this stage! But with a clean swoop Mike nets it. Dinner! Mike, Mike! He brings it up on the jetty, puts his foot brazenly behind the fish’s head, pushes the lure more brazenly with his naked fingers to release the hook. “Eight pounds?” he says, into the wind.

  I take a quick look, nod—eight pounds, yep. I say, “Dinner,” putting pressure on my own fish, gaining line slowly. The wind’s loud, the water louder; the gulls are making a racket. Mike throws his hands in the air, comically victorious. Neither of us has caught a good fish in three weeks and two days. He kicks and nudges his catch with a kind of triumphant respect (blue sneakers) into a big flotsam-filled space between the jetty boulders where it can’t flop back into the water, our own little fish vault. In five minutes it will be dead, no small matter.

  Mike throws another cast. His Hopkins sails off into the sky, trailing glistening line under the darkening clouds. “Into the vortex!” he hollers. As always, I surge with pleasure unto laughter at the way he uses words, and the surge quadruples with the great thrash of fish feeding. It is a vortex, a living vortex, greedy and violent. The wind itself seems full of fish. My hair whips around my head, my pants flap. My feet are cold, but that’s for later. Mike’s twelve-foot fishing rod bends double, a blade of grass. The stranger’s got a fish, too. His jacket whips in the wind. My fish is at the jetty now. I climb down the rocks, lean over the weed and surging foam, soaked now to the knees, keep tension on the line, grip the rocks with my toes. Seeing that the blue is well hooked I don’t call for the net, but simply grab the heavy leader—don’t slip, don’t miss, don’t fall in, don’t lose that fish—grab it high so as not to get too close to those brutal, clenched jaws. And I scrabble back up, holding taut the whole strained relationship of fish and line and hand and self, grinning in the wind, make the jetty top, loft the fish, get the stranger’s grin, get Mike’s, lay the fish on the rock, bare foot on his side, lean to reach my pliers, work the hook out gently as I can, feel him all flex and muscle and ready to have my toes, scoot him quick into our vault between the jetty rocks, stand there looking in for just a moment, damn thankful, dinner, all right, an offering: Mike’s fish, mine, ours. The fish are twins, over two feet long, sleek, the flash of sunlight from the struggling scales more the eponymous blue than the fish. They gasp. Dead they will only be grey. Alive, oh, alive they are blue and vicious, they roll their eyes, they stare, ready to twist and pounce and tear off your fingers, ready to tear off your nose and swallow it down, ready to flop with uncanny accuracy if you get too close, ready to get hold and make you pay for your cocky stance inside the last link of a food chain they well know to be cruel.

  The frenzy doesn’t stop, Mike’s vortex, the press, the rage and leap, the roiling madness, the widening gyre. Baitfish try to fly, try to leave the ocean entirely, whole schools in the gap between waves, shining arcs cut through by bluefish, bluefish raging. Our lures swim through the boiling cauldrons, send the baitfish leaping in fear, attract the big boys, chomp and pull. After a half hour we’ve caught five fish each, two at eight pounds, five more at five pounds, one, Mike’s latest, eleven pounds at least, the biggest I’ve seen. The varying weights are evidence of three schools feeding at once, thousands of individuals swimming at rocket speed after nourishment, converging on the rich Menemsha Harbor inlet.

  And we are not the only lucky ones. On the other jetty, across that narrow inlet, twenty or thirty fishermen cast frantically. Mike and I have made and always make the long drive around Menemsha pond to Lobsterville expressly to avoid that crowd, and a good thing. A circus over there. Crossed lines, snags, lures in people’s hair, sunset watchers in the way, little boys screaming, bluefish flopping onto the rocks then back into the water: mayhem, irritation, disaster mocking success. But the wind will blow them all away, it will, the wind likes empty rocks and winter.

  “Incredible,” our new chum says. He’s maybe ten years older than I (as I am ten years older than Mike), more well dressed, strangely apologetic, as if he thinks we are Islanders and expects our contempt. He says, “I’ve never been in the middle of it like this! Only read about it! It’s a convocation of schools! Could last for bloody hours!” His sweatshirt says IBM. He’s lean, not a guy who drinks much beer.

  Two men around Mike’s age join us on the jetty, racing excited along the rocks, pulling the packaging off their brand-new rods. “Our first day,” one of them says. “What do we do?” Mike gives them leaders from my box (Mike always unfailingly generous with my tackle), ties knots for them rather than spend the time to teach the difficult stuff. Before long and despite bad casts and dime-store bass lures, they’re catching fish with the rest of us and shouting with triumph. I help them land their first fish. IBM helps them untangle their reels when the time comes. When there’s plenty, one gives.

  More seagulls arrive by the moment and feed noisily, snapping up tattered pieces of herring and mackerel and sand eel left by the blues, not lingering, knowing better than to sit on the water dangling feet in the midst of all those snapping jaws. More fishermen, refugees from the jetty on the Menemsha side, arrive running, frantically preparing their tackle. Now Mike and IBM and I are at the very head of the jetty together, prime position. I cast, hook a fish, lose him, reel a few feet, hook another, lose him, reel further, hook yet another not ten feet from the rocks, bring him in.

  Next cast I hook a fish that shakes the lure free easily then bites it again, is caught. On several casts, two fish chase the lure, leaping, feinting, ten feet, twenty, till one prevails—strike! On one long cast, I think I’ve caught a sea monster. It pulls sluggishly to one side, then to the next, nothing like a bluefish. The line’s so heavy it takes me twenty minutes to get the mystery catch to the jetty, where I see the problem: two big blues have struck at once. Bobby Robertini will be sorry he decided not to come!

  “Pertinacious!” Mike shouts, and I laugh and laugh and laugh, cast again. What does he mean? Everything, everything! We are here, of substance!

  Two hours pass. The feed is still wallopingly, splashingly, on. The blues race into the channel, feed in the harbor. They come up within a few feet of the jetty, where we can see their mouths open and slam shut, see the macerated pieces of green mackerel and flashing herring and wriggling sand eel, smell the sweet oil of the baitfish-slick the blues leave behind. The blues! They slap their tails, they splash, they leap. The water writhes unceasing with insane predation and wind and wave. The sun hits the horizon; the sky goes gradually orange, goes more quickly red, all those grand clouds to catch the light. The tourists applaud the sunset like passengers applaud a plane landed well though the pilot can’t hear, like movie viewers applaud the screen, the director far away, far away, far away. They stare awhile in hopes of seeing the storied green flash. They get going home. We should too.

  At ten blues apiece Mike and I pause to confer. He thinks we have enough to feed the entire Labor Day picnic a good chunk of fish. We have comically, fake pompously, promised to provide a bluefish dinner for each of the forty or s
o people who will by now have gathered at the Robertinis’ house in Oak Bluffs. The joke was that we’ve caught nothing for the two weeks since the Robertinis have arrived, for longer than that, too, and the Robertinis have pretended, joshing, not to believe we have ever caught a fish at all, those fellows with their boat. The joke is we haven’t been able to provide fish for anybody, much less the forty!

  The sky goes black and starry behind us, deep violet ahead. The big clouds have hurried inland, dissipated over Boston. Hercules emerges above us, and Lyra, and Boötes, and the Big Dipper, and Venus is up, and reddish warring Mars. The frenzy, ungodly, goes on. We throw each catch back, careful not to wound those hard mouths. The jetty’s getting very crowded. The tide has turned, is falling. The feed can’t last. Across the channel the other jetty is a nightclub without bouncers, a dance floor with fishing rods.

  We quit. Mike and I pack up and quit. Two guys move up the jetty to claim our spot. And now there is the problem of transporting twenty slippery fish. We think to fillet them on the beach, but at the picnic forty fillets won’t make the impression twenty whole fish will make. I find a piece of lobster-trap rope the sea has disgorged, and we thread it in through twenty slackened mouths and out through twenty useless gills, carry the string between us, 150 pounds of fish, heavy. On the beach we settle in amongst the querulous gulls to clean fish, scaling them fast as we can—the party awaits—slicing each from anal vent to throat and pulling out swim bladders, hearts, livers, stomachs, intestines. In the very full stomachs we find sand eels, mackerel and herring, some whole, some bitten in half, packed in, stuffed in, no possible room for more—yet around the jetty the frenzy continues.

  Mike and I, we throw the fish innards to the birds, who fight to taste them first. We grin and grin, can’t stop, can’t stop shaking our heads. We don’t have to say a word. We love these fish. And it’s finally happened: a perfect day’s catch. We look at each other and cut bellies and laugh and look at each other and grin, thinking of the picnic to come. We look at each other and punch the other’s arm and slap high fives and grin. We only feel bad for the young men down the jetty. It is their first day fishing, ever, and it will never be like this again.