Born to Fish

by Tim Gallagher

  Winston shook his head and laughed when he heard about Greg’s robbery. He didn’t seem surprised. He pulled out a bag of marijuana, then quickly rolled a joint and handed it to Greg, who lit it up and took a long, deep drag, holding the smoke in as long as he could, finally releasing it in a massive gray cloud. He took another hit and handed the joint back to Winston. Greg smiled. Things didn’t seem so bad after all. It was warm and sunny and pleasant here, and it was good to be with Winston again; he had such an infectious sense of humor and happiness.

  Soon other people from the village started showing up at Winston’s shack. They’d all heard about Greg and were eager to meet him. They crowded around him, laughing till tears filled their eyes as he spoke the local vernacular like a Jamaican. Several people went home and brought back logs and lit a fire. Some brought food, including fruits and vegetables and a huge pot of curried goat, which they put on the fire. Before long, the little get-together had developed into a full-on party, with every man, woman, and child in the village taking part. And everyone—including Greg—laughed and sang and danced long into the night.

  Greg quickly got into the groove of living in Jamaica. He had originally thought he would spend only a week or so there at the most, but things were so easy and mellow, his time away stretched into two weeks, then three, and he still hadn’t made arrangements to get back home. And why should he? He wasn’t at all eager to return to the specter of his father wasting slowly away and the rage of his mother. Besides, it was going to be a hassle to get his paperwork straightened out so he could get home. He’d have to go back to Kingston without any money and throw himself on the mercy of the American Embassy to help him get back to the United States. And Jamaica was so nice. Greg was having a great time with Winston and all his other new friends, living just like a Jamaican and loving it—eating the amazing food; working in the fields with the other men, whacking away at sugarcane with a machete and tying it in huge bundles; and getting lean and tan and strong, his hair bleached surfer blond by the Caribbean sun.

  Greg went to church every Sunday with the Jamaicans in a simple wood-frame building that looked like an old one-room schoolhouse. The congregation was always enthusiastic. “The church service was just like a scene from Forrest Gump—lots of singing and dancing,” said Greg. He was the only white person anywhere near, but the people completely embraced him. “I loved it there. I almost didn’t ever want to leave.”

  Winston’s shack stood on a hill, surrounded by coconut palms and other tropical vegetation. The weather was steadily pleasant—warm but with a cool breeze always blowing in from the ocean to keep the humidity down. It seemed as near to paradise as Greg could ever imagine. While he was staying there, he helped Winston make improvements to his house, such as wiring it up, making it one of the few dwellings in the village with electricity. They would sit together in the evening, smoking pot and listening to the radio. It was strange hearing the news of the world. It all seemed so distant and alien to Greg now. This is the way life should be, he thought, sitting sleepily on a porch, high on a hill in an island paradise.

  One night the radio brought some disturbing news: a massive tropical storm was gathering strength in the Caribbean and would probably hit Jamaica within three days. It was hard to imagine. The weather had been sunny, clear, and pleasant for days and would remain that way right up to the morning when the storm arrived. The storm, dubbed Gilbert, would become a Category 3 hurricane by the time it hit Jamaica, the most damaging storm that had ever struck there in recorded history.

  Greg and Winston went to each house in the village to alert people: “Batten down de hatches, mon. A storm be comin’.” They hammered plywood boards across the windows in Winston’s shack and helped others do the same to their dwellings; everyone brought as much of their outdoor belongings inside as they could fit. But after taking these precautions, Greg and Winston quickly got back into the relaxed Jamaican mode. They’d done all they could. Might as well kick back, smoke a joint, and enjoy the show when all hell broke loose on the island.

  The clear blue skies that dawned three days later were deceptive. Maybe nothing would happen after all; it was so calm. But at midmorning, a dark, swirling maelstrom of pent-up energy began looming on the horizon, moving quickly closer, horrifying in its potential. Greg didn’t know what to make of it. Even Winston had never seen anything like this in all his years there. As the storm broke, they went inside Winston’s shack and hunkered down.

  Winston still didn’t seem fazed. He smiled, lit up another joint, and handed it to Greg. They sat smoking pot and munching on leftover food from the night before, feeling perfectly secure in the Long Man’s wooden shack. Of course, the electricity went out the instant the high winds hit the island. That was to be expected. But the moaning of the wind and the way it kept picking up in intensity, getting louder and louder as it lashed the tiny village, quickly rising to a howling cres­cendo, was terrifying. Greg kept glancing over at Winston, trying to read his face, but he was as inscrutable as ever, smiling whenever Greg looked his way. Maybe things will be okay, Greg thought. Maybe this is the way it always is when storms hit Jamaica. But then the roof blew off the shack and the walls began tumbling down.

  Greg and Winston fled outside. The wind, well over 100 miles an hour, instantly knocked them off their feet. They crawled on all fours to some nearby coconut palms and clung to them as tightly as barnacles on the hull of a boat. Greg assumed that this would last for ten or fifteen minutes, or maybe an hour at most, like a violent summer thunderstorm back home. But it continued, knocking over trees and houses all around them. Coconuts kept blowing past Greg like howitzer shells, exploding as they hit objects in their path, sending shrapnel-like fragments everywhere. He struggled to keep his head down. Several coconuts hit his body, and it felt like getting struck by huge rocks. His shoulder—the one he’d injured in the state championship high school football game—throbbed with pain as he held on for hours. “I just hugged that tree as hard as I could, waiting for the storm to blow past,” he said. “It took forever. My shoulder was hurting so bad, I didn’t know if I could hold on. But I knew if I let go, I’d get killed.”

  By evening the storm had passed, but a scene of utter devastation and horror surrounded them. Virtually every building had been flattened or blown away, leaving tens of thousands of people homeless and dozens dead from drowning or being hit by flying objects or falling trees.

  “You couldn’t get down to the city from there,” said Greg. “All the roads were either washed out or blocked by fallen trees. It was awful. I didn’t even think about leaving at that point. Everyone really needed help.”

  Greg spent weeks helping people rebuild after the storm. It was a trying time for everyone. The people there had always been poor, but they lived well for their means. Now they had nothing; the storm had destroyed everything they owned. Still, it was amazing how quickly they bounced back. Virtually right after the storm, people were gathering up pieces of their devastated homes—some materials had been carried more than 200 yards away—and trying to find their missing livestock: chickens, ducks, geese, and goats. The next morning, the sound of people hammering nails and sawing boards with handsaws rang out all around the village. Their determination was impressive and inspiring.

  Finally, after staying in the village for several more weeks, Greg hiked back to Kingston to see about getting back home. It was tough to leave. He loved all the people in the village, and a lot of tears were shed as Greg said goodbye to Winston and all the new friends he’d met there. He made his way alone to the American Embassy and told them what had happened. They were very helpful and made arrangements to get him a new passport and a plane ticket to Miami, where his Uncle Donny could meet him at the airport. He had spent more than three months in Jamaica, but it seemed like years to Greg.

  Living in the mountains, it had been too difficult to get down to the shore, so Greg hadn’t been able to fish the entire time he was there. He hated to leave Jamaica with
out catching a single fish, so he went to the harbor to have a look around. There he met a couple of fishing guides who generously told him the location of an excellent place to fish nearby and even loaned him a rod and reel, despite the fact that he had no money to pay them. That afternoon as he was casting from the dock, reeling in again and again, a six-foot-long barracuda hammered his bait and took off, bending the rod double, the reel screaming as Greg fought to prevent its escape. He was back in the saddle again.

  * * *

  Into the West

  Greg lay sprawled on the sidewalk in the glaring winter sun, his mind still shrouded in a fog as he struggled to regain consciousness. A policeman knelt over him, holding his hat above Greg to block the sunlight from his face. In great pain and feeling disoriented, as though returning from a long, dark journey, Greg felt the hot, wet blood on his face and could taste it in his mouth. Slowly it started coming back to him: climbing into his Jeep that morning; heading to the gym for a workout; passing a place he knew so well, the site of old Mr. Corey’s trout farm. He thought about it even as he lay bleeding from multiple gashes and abrasions. But Corey’s was long gone. Although the ponds still remained, the building had been replaced by an office complex that housed a medical insurance company. Yes, he remembered it now: he was driving through the intersection in front of Corey’s; a van slammed into him broadside, flipping the Jeep, throwing him out—and he was flying through the air . . . until his face smashed against the pavement . . . and everything went dark.

  Now the policeman was talking to him, asking him if he was okay. Greg recognized him—they had gone to high school together. “Don’t worry, an ambulance is coming,” the policeman said, then told Greg about the other driver, a security guard at the insurance company who had been driving one of their vans. He was now passed out in the driver’s seat and he reeked of alcohol; he didn’t even have a driver’s license. Greg grimaced with pain when he tried to nod.

  A distant siren became louder and louder until an ambulance pulled up right beside him. The EMTs jumped out and started working on him: checking his vital signs, putting a brace on his neck, hoisting him onto a stretcher, loading him into the ambulance, and finally rushing him to the hospital with the siren screaming. He was badly injured, with a smashed face, a concussion, and a broken nose. A big chunk of his scalp had been ripped out, he had a severe gash in his leg, and one of his fingers had nearly been torn off.

  Greg closed his eyes and sighed as the emergency room nurses started an IV drip with a sedative and a painkiller. One more time in the hospital, he thought. One more close call. Now what? He’d be stuck in his parents’ condo again, this time without a car; trapped there with his father in the basement, constantly begging Greg to kill him, his mother nagging at him, and no way to escape. But he didn’t want to think about it now. He let the warm glow of the pain medication settle over him, carrying him away like a tidal drift, rocking him gently as he fell into a deep slumber.

  When Greg was released from the hospital, he set out trying to line up an attorney and begin the process of mounting a lawsuit against the medical insurance company whose driver had nearly killed him. It seemed to Greg the case should be a slam dunk for anyone who wanted to take it, and the lawyer he approached, named Frank, agreed and set to work on it.

  Of course, lawsuits always take months, and in the meantime Greg had to sit at his parents’ condo with no money and no job prospects. His only transportation after his Jeep got totaled was an old dirt bike that wasn’t even street legal. The bike’s motor was extremely loud, and whenever he fired it up, the neighbors in the condo complex would call the police and complain, so he had to take off quickly and keep to the back roads.

  He started riding out to some of the nearby farms, hoping to get a job. They didn’t need anyone at any of the places he had worked previously, but one day he stopped at a local fruit orchard and talked to David Henry, the ninety-year-old owner, who quickly hired him. Greg felt right at home there, working alongside two crews of Jamaicans. The orchard grew mostly apples but also peaches, plums, nectarines, and blueberries. It was all of the finest quality, and it wasn’t for local sale—all of the fruit was shipped overseas to the Netherlands and other lucrative European markets.

  Old-man Henry was a character: tough, hardworking, and stoic. Once while Greg was working there, Mr. Henry had to go into the hospital for a couple of weeks to have open-heart surgery. On the very day he got back, with the stitches still in place where the surgeons had cracked open his chest, he was driving around on his tractor, working as hard as anyone.

  As soon as Greg got to work each day, he would ride around with Mr. Henry in the company pickup truck, going up and down the orchard rows. A rifle lay on the dashboard. “He was a tough old bastard,” said Greg. “He used to take me with him every morning when he went to hunt deer. He would shoot them with a rifle right out of the truck.” Of course, this would be against the law if they were sport hunting, but Mr. Henry had a depredation permit, which allowed him to kill deer and other animals that were damaging his crops. Whenever they got a deer, Greg would help him load it into the back of the truck and take it to the Jamaicans, who would cook it up into a rich curry for everyone. “Working at the orchard was one of the healthiest times in my life—eating great Jamaican cooking and the homegrown fruit and vegetables we grew there.”

  Greg had to ride his dirt bike two miles to work each morning, but his neighbors were onto him and would call the police as soon as he fired it up. One day the cops red-lighted him, and he took off, reaching speeds of more than ninety miles an hour on the tiny back roads. He ducked into the farm, hid his dirt bike in a shed, put on a hardhat to help conceal his identity, jumped onto a tractor, and started driving it through the orchard, acting as though he had been there all morning. It worked—the cops pulled their prowl car into the farm and looked around for a while, but they didn’t even glance twice at him.

  Mr. Henry, who had seen the cops chasing Greg that day, mentioned that he had a car stored on the property that he would be happy to sell him. He walked over to the barn, slid the huge door open, and flipped on a light switch. Greg was stunned to see an immaculate blue 1977 Ford LTD, looking like it had just rolled off the assembly line. He opened the door and gazed inside at the plush seats and pristine dashboard, with an odometer that showed less than 40,000 miles. Mr. Henry had driven it in there years earlier, when it was only a couple years old, and never taken it out again. Mr. Henry said he would just deduct $100 a month from Greg’s paycheck until the car was paid for.

  Greg was a hard worker and within a month was put in charge of one of the crews of Jamaican laborers. It was a dream job for him. With his “management” position at the orchard, Greg was provided with an old house to live in. Although he was only paid $650 a month, free rent and utilities and much of his daily food were part of the deal. But best of all, he didn’t ever have to go home. For months, his parents didn’t even know where he was.

  It was a good time for Greg. He had everything he needed. He started fishing with his old friends the Carlsons again, cruising all over Long Island Sound in their fishing boat, catching more striped bass than ever.

  Meanwhile, the lawsuit slowly progressed. It took nearly a year for the case to be resolved, but at the end of the process Greg got a whopping settlement from the insurance company.

  “I went from nothing to having a quarter of a million dollars,” said Greg. He immediately paid Mr. Henry cash for what he still owed on the Ford LTD, counting out a stack of hundred-dollar bills on his kitchen table. He also went shopping for a brand-new Jeep to replace the one that had been destroyed in the accident.

  “I bought myself this big, bad-ass Jeep CJ-7, California style,” said Greg. “It was right off the cover of 4-Wheel Drive magazine. I paid cash for it. And I bought all new clothes.”

  Several of his friends at the University of Rhode Island were about to graduate, so he drove there to attend the commencement ceremony and the parties th
at would follow. It had only been two years since he dropped out of URI after losing his athletic scholarship, but he showed up looking every inch the distinguished alum.

  “My friends were like, ‘What have you been up to?’ ‘Oh, just living the dream,’ ” said Greg.

  He was an instant hit with his old classmates and went partying with them on the beach at Narragansett. Everyone wanted to know what he was doing, and he said he planned to head out across the country, fishing, partying, seeing all the sights, and having a great time. This idea had actually only occurred to him a few weeks earlier, when his old babysitter, Alice, who had taken care of him as a young child when they lived in Hamden, returned to Connecticut with her fiancé to get married there. Alice came from a troubled family, and Herb Myerson had helped her escape that situation. He’d encouraged her to join the Air Force, and soon afterwards she had moved to Nevada. She called Greg and asked if he would give her away at her wedding, because she didn’t have a father, and he agreed.

  “The guy she was marrying, Danny, was a poker player at a casino and had lived his whole life in Reno, which is a desert,” said Greg. “I remember when they landed here, I heard him telling his friend on the phone, ‘Oh, my God, It’s like a jungle here. You can’t even see into the woods. It’s hot and humid.’ He’d never left Nevada before.”

  But Greg took a liking to Danny—they were both avid snow skiers. The couple stayed with Greg in his house at the Henry farm the entire time they were in Connecticut. After the wedding, they told him if he ever wanted to go out West, he’d always have a place to stay at their home.