The Schernoff Discoveries

by Gary Paulsen

  “Is it good?”

  I nodded. “It’s good. Very good. Too good for what we’re doing. Let’s put it away and use mine, all right?”

  I finally talked him into putting the rod back in the case and handed him one of the spring-steel junkers. I showed him the basics—how the reel worked, how to lock it and crank it, how to cast (more on this in a bit), how to attach a hook to the leader, then a sinker, then a bobber about five feet from the hook.

  “We throw it out,” I said, “and watch the bobber. When a fish starts fooling with it the bobber will go up and down.”

  “That’s it? That’s all there is to it?”

  “Not quite. When you see the bobber go under good and solid, when you know the fish really has the hook in his mouth, you heave back a bit with your arms and set the hook. Use your thumb on the line on the reel to keep pressure and hold the fish back. Don’t pull crazy, just enough to set it. Here.” I held out the lard bucket. “Put a worm on your hook.”

  “I am not acquainted with the procedure.”

  “Oh—like this.” I took a worm and threaded it on my hook. “You want it to look good, delicious to the fish. A great glop of good fish food.”

  He nodded, took about a half pound of worms out of the bucket, and snagged the mess on his hook. “Like this?”

  “Close enough—now follow me and do as I do.” I led him down to the edge of the water. The river made a large curve there, slowly meandering around a stand of oaks and high rocks, and where it pushed against the bank it had carved out a half-acre backwater. I knew it as a place full of sunfish and bullheads—both easy to catch and good to eat.

  “Watch,” I said. I snapped the lock off my reel and cast the hook and bobber out about forty feet. The hook dropped in and the bobber skidded to the side and stopped over the top of it. “Like that.”

  “Looks simple enough.” Harold nodded. He stepped to the bank, looped a long arm back and with a mighty heave whipped the end of the rod out in what would have been a perfect cast.

  Except that he didn’t unlock the reel. The ball of worms couldn’t go out more than four feet and then all the energy of the cast went into the rod and whipped the whole mess back into Harold’s mouth, which was slightly open in concentration.

  “Yeaaack!”

  Luckily the hook didn’t set or we would have had a merry time trying to clear his mouth. But he did get a full load of worms in there and spent most of the rest of the day spitting.

  He was game, however, and on the next try he unlocked his reel, took another mighty swing and caught me in the back of the head. The hook hit bone and bounced out without setting and I used the best words I had learned in the bowling alley.

  “Wait a minute,” I said when my head stopped feeling like it was on fire. I moved well to the rear, hunkered down in back of a bush with a good-sized oak between us, judged the wind and all the angles and then nodded. “All right—let her rip.”

  I had explained the principle of backlash to him, but the whole process of controlling the reel with thumb pressure while the line spun out, stopping the spinning just as the hook hit the water, then letting up again—all of that while whipping the rod through the casting arc and aiming at where the bait was to go—all that was way too much for Harold at this stage.

  It started well enough. The line whizzed out, the bait flew across the water at a great speed, and then a snarl backlash hit the reel so hard it stopped dead. The line slammed to the end of the tangle, hung for half a heartbeat and then headed back so fast it was impossible to see it move. It screamed past Harold’s ear, caught on the end of the rod and described three full circles while it wrapped around his head.

  “Yeaaack!” Again he had a mouthful of worms.

  I helped him unwind the line and noticed that once more the hook had somehow missed setting in his head. “Harold, are you sure you want to do this?”

  He glared at me, nodded shortly and untangled his backlash. I went behind the bush again.

  Another wild swing and he cast almost perfectly off to his left, onto the bank. He reeled in, took a slightly different stance and let go again. This time he got it all—aim, release, thumb pressure and timing—perfectly right. The baited hook dropped into the water about twenty feet to the right of mine, the bobber skidded and settled perfectly and he turned and smiled at me.

  “See? It’s all a matter of fundamentals. You just apply knowledge to mystery and knowledge will always—”

  I’m not sure what he was going to say and later he couldn’t remember but it doesn’t matter. When he turned, it brought the reel close to the cotton vest he was still wearing (along with the hip boots) and I saw three things with a clarity that is still with me.

  First, his bobber and mine suddenly disappeared. They did not bob or wiggle, or jerk, or go down and come up—they simply disappeared and I never saw either of them again. Simultaneously my rod, which I had locked and laid on the bank while I went behind the bush, jumped into the water (or that’s how it looked) and likewise disappeared.

  The third thing was Harold. The reel caught in his vest, the line jerked tight and he flew off the bank. I had used some old commercial fishing line I’d found in the basement of the apartment house I lived in and I believe it was a-hundred-and-twenty-pound test. It was enough to pull Harold off the bank, hip boots and all, and into the water. Something enormous had his line.

  “Yaawwp!” He had time for just the one sound and then he was under. It all happened so fast that I was still standing there, trying to consider that my rod was gone, that something had taken everything when it dawned on me: Everything meant Harold as well.

  “Harold!” I yelled, and dove off the bank. The dive brought me in contact with the heel of Harold’s hip boot, which hit me so hard on the top of the head it made me dizzy.

  I grabbed, he grabbed, we had a free-for-all and I finally got his head and mine above the surface. The water was only five feet or so deep in the backwater but Harold felt like he was stuck in the mud.

  The hip boots! They were filled with water.

  “Kick the boots off!” I yelled, holding him from the rear with one arm around his neck.

  “You’re … choking … me.”

  “Kick the boots off!”

  I let him go and he untied and kicked free of one boot, then the other, and we made the shore, where we lay side by side gasping.

  “What,” Harold said, “was that?”

  I looked at the vest where the reel had literally ripped loose. Those old rods were made of high-test steel; they would bend but they never broke, not even when they pulled a person into the water.

  I’d heard stories of fish like the one that came through. In the old days, they said, sturgeon were huge, so big it took a team of horses to pull them up onto the bank when they were hooked. Hundreds of pounds they weighed, as old as dinosaurs, primitive, ugly, enormous. People said that when they died they didn’t come up but lay on the bottom and sank into the mud and just disappeared. I had never seen one. I would never see one, not in my whole life.

  “Do you know what it was?”

  The reel caught in Harold’s vest had dragged him in and if it hadn’t torn loose he would have ended up in the river proper, where the depth dropped to fifteen or twenty feet. The boots would have dragged him down and nothing I could have done would have helped. He would be dead now. Dead down in the mud with that … that thing. Gone.

  “What was it?”

  But I lay back on the warm bank and closed my eyes and didn’t answer, felt the sun dry my body and clothes and thought how much better Harold was alive than he would be dead. He was my friend. I knew that now because of the relief, and I lay in the sun and didn’t think of the two rods gone or how big the fish must have been and I didn’t answer Harold then or ever; just lay in the sun and felt how good it was to be alive.

  7. On the Nature of Wealth

  A fool and his golf balls are soon parted.

  —HAROLD ON BECOMING RICH />
  I’m not sure just when we decided to get rich but I have a good idea. I’d spent most of my life working at whatever jobs I could get—selling newspapers to drunks, setting pins in the bowling alley, working on farms in the summer for a dollar a day—so I knew about work. In fact I felt as if I knew way more than I wanted to know about it, and the idea of being wealthy—so I would not have to work sixteen-hour days for a dollar a day and my keep—was beautiful to me.

  Harold, on the other hand, had a less strenuous life. He wasn’t lazy and was willing to work, but his father had a good job and didn’t drink, and Harold had a room and three meals a day, and his parents bought all his clothes. I thought he lived in luxury.

  His room was upstairs and had a dormer with a window looking out over the backyard. We were sitting in the dormer, where he had a table that held his transmitter and receiver. It was evening, just after dark, and Harold was trying to talk to somebody in Russia but kept getting a man in New York.

  Harold was an amateur radio operator—a ham—and we spent many hours talking in Morse code to people all over the world. Back then code transmission was all we could afford. Or rather Harold talked and I watched and listened, amazed at how it all worked. I could not believe how he could have made the little Heathkit forty-watt transmitter from a kit, soldered wires and vacuum tube sockets and resistors and condensers and coils in a device that would allow us to hear—through whistles and hums and squawks—the little beeps and dit-dahs of people all around the world.

  It had so impressed me that I’d made a small oscillator—with Harold’s help—that emitted a squeal into a headset when it was keyed. I was trying to learn Morse code so I could become a ham as well, tapping away on an old telegraph key he had given me. I could stumble through the code and get enough letters when somebody transmitted to have an idea of what they were saying.

  We “worked” the man in New York that night and he told us about a new car he had just bought—a Cadillac—and how he loves to ride in it. I leaned back, thinking of what it would be like to have enough money to own something like that, not just a car but a big, new luxury car. Harold signed off with the man and turned to me and must have been thinking the same thing because he smiled and said, “Let’s get a car.”

  As with so many things Harold suggested, this thought was so far beyond the scope of possibility that it bordered on the absurd. I shook my head. “We’re fourteen and can’t legally drive for another year. And then only with a licensed driver after we get our permit. Cars cost money, which we don’t have. And who in his right mind would sell a car to two fourteen-year-old kids?”

  Harold shrugged. “Technicalities. This is a problem like any other problem. There is always a solution.” He went to a blackboard he had on his wall near the ham table and wrote a formula.

  C=T X E X M

  “Where C is car and T is time and E is energy and M is money—it’s a fairly simple equation, really.”

  “And where do we get the money?”

  He nodded and wrote another formula.

  M=T X E

  “Where M is money and T is time and E is energy. We simply work for it.”

  As this happened to be the summer and every able-bodied boy and girl in town was looking for part-time work I could have pointed out that finding work would be next to impossible. But I was afraid he’d just do another formula. Besides, it wouldn’t have stopped him. Nothing stopped Harold.

  He stood in front of the blackboard, frowning, thinking. He reached forward to write with the chalk, stopped, started and then smiled and turned.

  “We’ll caddy.”

  “Caddy?”

  “You know, carry golf clubs for players.”

  “I know what caddying is—I used to do it and—”

  “There’s a tournament this weekend. My uncle is playing and he told my father he could never get a good caddy. That’s it. We’ll caddy, they’ll pay us, we’ll get a car. It’s simple.”

  The thing is, I had tried caddying and they paid only fifty cents for nine holes. Of course you were supposed to get a tip as well, but not everybody tipped. You could do only about eighteen holes a day so you might end up with a dollar for the whole day. I wasn’t sure what cars cost but I was pretty sure at a dollar a day it would take us a long time to buy one.

  But Harold had a way of saying things so that even when you knew they were impossible it seemed like they could happen. And that’s why the next day, Saturday, at six-thirty in the morning I followed Harold as we pedaled the three miles out of town to the golf course for the tournament. And if you had told me it would be the first step in becoming rich I would have laughed in your face.

  At first it looked bad. There were dozens of boys there already, waiting to caddy. I bought a bottle of Pepsi for a nickel and a bag of peanuts for another nickel. Then I poured the peanuts in the Pepsi and ate-drank it for breakfast while we waited. Or I should say while I waited.

  Harold moved away from the rest of us standing around under the trees by the first tee and went over to the driving range, where some early birds were buying little mesh buckets of balls and hitting them out into a meadow to practice. I saw him watch for a time and then he went back to the pro shack and talked to the golf pro for a minute or so before coming back to me.

  “The money is in the balls,” he said in a whisper, standing close to me.

  “What?”

  “Balls. The practice balls. He charges a quarter a bucket and he says he’s always short of balls. That’s where we’ll make our money.”

  He stopped and I waited and when he didn’t continue I prompted him. “I don’t understand a thing you’re saying.”

  “It’s simple. The pro says he’ll pay us a dime a ball for every ball we can find to sell him. Listening to my uncle, who is an average golfer, I calculated that every golfer loses at least one ball per round, usually in an area near the golf course named—correctly—the rough. There are no exact figures but let’s assume that on a given weekend three hundred people play golf. That’s three hundred balls lost per weekend and even if we assume a recovery factor on the order of fifty percent—balls found by other golfers, caddies, maintenance people—that means there are still close to a hundred and fifty balls a weekend lost out here.” He smiled. “Think of it—thousands of balls lost and we get a dime for every one we find.…”

  Of course it didn’t work that way exactly, but it was amazing how close he came.

  At first we didn’t hunt for balls. After all the other boys had caddy jobs Harold’s uncle showed up with a friend and they hired both of us to caddy—at, of course, fifty cents for nine holes.

  But our fortunes changed on the sixth hole. This was a two-hundred-yard straight shot across the river, which was about forty yards wide at this point, moving by sluggishly and gray brown.

  We watched Harold’s uncle put three straight balls into the water, close to the far side but well out into the river, before he got one across. As we started across I heard him swear and say, “That must be thirty balls I’ve dropped in there this year alone.”

  Even I knew what that meant and I turned to see Harold smiling and nodding, his mental calculator obviously clicking away: If the average golfer put thirty balls a year in the river, how many golfers would it take to buy a car?

  “Harold, where are you?”

  “Over here, by the bank, wait—eeeaaah! Something’s got me, something’s got me!”

  “Where are you?”

  “Oh, never mind. It was a stick poking me about two centimeters below my … in a bad place. It’s all right. I’m all right now.”

  I gave up and went back to work. It was close to midnight and we were in the river by the bank where Harold’s uncle had dropped those three balls in the water. We would have come to dive for balls in the afternoon, but the golf course had, as Harold put it, “some silly regulation about diving naked on the sixth green.”

  We were not doing well. The water was about five feet deep and moved a
round the curve just fast enough to make it difficult to stand. The bottom was hard-packed, fairly dense mud and I had evolved a method that seemed to at least partially work. I would feel around with my toes and when I discovered something that felt round I would swap ends and dive down and grope with my hands. So far I had three balls, four beer bottles and an old driver somebody had thrown away.

  Hardly enough to buy a car.

  Harold was doing worse. He could swim, just, but everything else was difficult for him. The problem was he knew too much and knowledge can sometimes be a very frightening thing.

  “Did you know there are large snapping turtles in this river?” he had asked while we were sitting on the bank undressing in the moonlight. “They can bring their jaws together with over four hundred foot-pounds of compressed energy at the point of bite. Do you have any idea what four hundred foot-pounds of energy would do to my—”

  “Turtles don’t snap that way, Harold. Only if you attack them—then they bite in self-defense. Don’t worry.”

  “They have a brain the size of a pea,” he said. “How do they know exactly what constitutes an attack? Maybe my toe touching their nose purely by accident in the dark water would make them think they’re being attacked. Maybe I wouldn’t have time to apologize.”

  “Don’t worry. If you like I’ll do all the diving.”

  Of course that got him. He could no more let me go alone than he could apologize to a snapping turtle. In a bit we slid into the water.

  “I think this is where the balls seemed to drop,” I said after half an hour, having found only the three balls. “Why aren’t we finding more?”

  “Eeeaaah! Something just grabbed my—no, never mind, it’s another stick. Why do they always seem to poke me exactly there?”

  “That’s enough, Harold. We need to figure out why we aren’t finding more balls. Get to figuring, will you?”

  This was like waving a red rag in front of a bull and he pulled himself back up on the bank and stood in the moonlight, studying the river. “Hmmm—how fast would you say the current was flowing?”