Obama Care

by Jason Scimitar

80

  Greg Hauser packed his car again with fishing rods and a twenty-two caliber squirrel gun. He drove to his friends’ houses to pick them up. They liked to camp together several times each summer. When they were younger and had enough money, they’d drive up to Canada, then fly into virgin lakes filled with huge fish who had never seen a fly or a lure and had never known the terror of hooks inside their mouths. They were innocent as American’s had been before Obama Care destroyed what little was left of their freedoms including their freedom to select doctors and to receive the procedures their physicians wanted for them. All of that was gone now.

  They camped on a clear stream filled with stocked trout. Greg Hauser, Al Buttons, Fred Ashcroft, and Gil Warner dipped their fly rods into the ice cold Ozark Mountain stream and talked about the Saint Louis Cardinals, women they had known in high school, and the things that happened when they were family men.

  “I am getting older, and I can feel it in my bones,” Al Buttons said, as he maneuvered his fly rod this way and that, “but there was a time when I was young, virile, full of come, and horny all of the time. My fingers smelled of rainbow trout twenty-four hours a day as did my upper lip, just like they will in a few minutes. I won’t need to explain that, will I?”

  They laughed. It was vintage trout conversation. Eventually it would get down to grandma’s apple pie recipes, but that would come later. Conversational degeneration took hours and days.

  “I was reading about what happened in Cincinnati. Someone should write a book and entitle it Obama Care: The Novel Concerning a Low Level Government Created Serial Killer Set Lose on an Innocent Society. It would be great reading.”

  “That’s for sure,” said Fred Ashcroft. “I’ll read it. I’ll order it on my Kindle. I can see the letters perfectly that way. It makes reading easy as pie for me.”

  They were not getting any younger. Age had been easy on them so far, but eventually they’d be suffering from Parkinson's, cancer, heart disease, dimming eyesight, and dementia. In the end they’d be grasping at the staffers’ breasts in their nursing homes.

  “My dad got old and died,” Gil Warner mused. “They never tried to save him. He was cut off from red meat and fresh farm butter. As a result, he died with a grimace. I doubt he wanted to live after the steaks were withdrawn. He probably figured death was preferable to his enforced culinary deprivation. So he ate meats anyway, and passed away quietly in his sleep. I asked him about it, and he said, ‘Well, son, you have to die of something.’ I think he was pretty wise about that time, so much so, that he wanted to check out and be done with it. I guess I was boring to him. I can’t say as I can blame him.”

  “Obama Care killed my wife,” Greg said. “I can’t say it was appreciated. She deserved a lot better than that. I miss her, I can tell you. Every day, I think about her being right here beside me. Too bad, it won’t happen.”

  “It’s a terrible thing, Greg,” Al said. “I know how much you cared about her.”

  “Same here, Greg,” Fred said.

  Gil chimed in as well. “Yes, it’s terrible, Greg. I feel for what you are going through. It happened to me also.”

  Greg cast a dark fly into the stream and carefully guided it over the rocks, watching it flow with the water and hoping a trout would take it. He liked the feel of rainbows resisting his nearly invisible two pound leader. He put most of them back. He only kept those with a fatal wound to their gills.

  “She was a corker, all right,” Greg said. “I always liked your wife, Gil.”

  “I heard the Cincinnati poisoning was done by an Obama Care terrorist, said Al. “I can’t say I’d blame a guy for doing that.”

  “Seems a bit extreme,” Gil said. “Not that I haven’t had desires to do the same thing many times over. I’m just too much of a lazy retard to ever do it.”

  “Me, neither,” Greg lied. “Anyone doing that should be prosecuted.” It didn’t hurt to embellish false innocence with equally false statements.

  Greg chuckled at this two-faced lie. It was great to toss a little bull at the guys now and then. After all, that was exactly what his camping trips were all about. Mental dribble, bull shit conversations, and general unwinding.

  “I got a bite,” Al said.

  His line became taut, then his pole bent as he set the hook.

  The other men drew in their lines and watched. They never kept their lines in the water when a buddy was fighting a big one. They had gotten hung up too many times that way. Once they were hung up, the hooked fish usually got away.

  Al’s fly rod was extremely flexible. It’s tip bent down in a responsive arc to each pull of the terrified fish. The rod’s tip moved right and left as the trout tried in vain to spit the hook. The fish zigzagged like a staggering drunk in the rushing stream’s icy throat. It was a fast gargling river of swift water, but even so the trout were bound to be caught with a well set hook. Al was an expert at working the fish here. He rarely failed to score. The fish finally was worn down. He came up on his side, willing to let Al do whatever he wanted. Al coaxed him into his net.

  “Well, looky here,” Al said. “What a nice trout you are.”

  He pulled the fish from the net and removed his hook. The fish was not fatally injured, so he was a candidate for Al’s early release program. Al hooked a fish scale to the thing’s mouth and measured its weight. “Two point three pounds,” Al said. “Perfect for eating. But this is one that got away.” Al bent down and moved the trout back and forth in the water. After a few moments, the trout regained strength, and he sailed out of Al’s hands and back into the current.

  “Nice move,” Greg said. “He’ll live to see a lot more days.”

  “For sure,” Gil chimed in. “Smart move, bud.”

  Al smiled. Releasing the fish was almost always more fun than catching one.

  He often imagined himself playing the part of a Chinese lad who would purchase a finch in a cage just for the pleasure of releasing it into the wild. He imagined a tiny finch standing on the edge of its cage’s opening. Then, as the little bird flew away, Al imagined the kid’s mouth opening in a smile of recognition just like his own had done just now. Releasing a bird into the wild gave so much pleasure for such a minor expense. Al surmised how a man’s death was a lot like releasing a fish.

  Long after he was ill, a person would escape the pain of being caught by allowing himself the happy release that only death could bring to a dying man in great pain. And after all, Al thought, I was born into this world to die. I’m only here for a little time.

  “Releasing a trout is the least I can do,” Gil said. “I am restoring the world’s order.”

  Greg laughed, because it was pure Al Buttons to say something like that. He was more philosophical than most were in a fisherman’s camp. He liked to think about the meaning of life, as though it might do some good to the world to think that way.

  Greg Hauser knew differently. Life’s only meaning was a dance between love and pain. It lasted just a little while. Then, it was gone. Over. Kaput, as the Germans would say.

  That day, the men ate several of their fish. They cleaned them, then dredged them in flour, and dropped them into a pan bubbling with hot virgin olive oil. There was nothing like the smell and sound of freshly caught fish as they fried in their pans under the trees. The wind wafted across the men, gently cooling them off, and providing them with a feeling of robustness. A return to nature did each of them a great deal of good. It restored their batteries for the trip back to the craziness of global America and the fascist dictators who ruled the known world with their vicious iron fists.

  Why am I so political? Greg mused.

  After all it wasn’t like such posturing was going to get him somewhere he wanted to go. Besides, nobody liked guys who were overly political. They made everyone nervous, especially in the days following the Patriot Act.

  The feds were everywhere, rummaging into the private lives of citizens and making them fearful and miserable.

&
nbsp; In a way, Greg figured all Americans had been reduced down to being like these helpless trout. They existed to be played. They were just little economic units to be worked like slaves, then taxed and tossed away when they got old and died. The feds were lazy worker bees as well. Once they tired of screwing with a guy, they let him go. It was as though they’d had their maximal fun with him, and that was enough. They’d made him miserable and afraid, and there was nothing else they could do.

  Besides, there was no use to run it into total redundancy. So they let the old ones go. Next, they’d find someone else to screw around with. It didn’t matter who it was. People were a mere convenience. They only existed for the government’s benefit.

  Most Americans understood this from the beginning of their lives. Only, today that was even more evident.

  The next morning, Greg was out on the stream again, dipping his flies into the deep holes where huge rainbow trout lurked in the darkness below. He felt within his fingers the strikes they made at his hand-tied insects. The flies swam resplendently in the stream’s rush flashing their gentle feathers. Each fly had been laced in colors designed to anger the fish. As the flies swam through the water, just above the bottom, the fish came forward, sucked them into their mouths, then turned and hooked themselves. He caught and released, caught and released.

  In doing this he dreamed of the deaths in Cincinnati. He knew the American people had learned right away that this had happened on account of the Obama Care legislation. The more they learned of deaths across the country, the more they understood that something was amiss.

  They were being fleeced by powerful insurance interests, same as always, only now the cruelty of the insurance companies was far more intense. The deaths caused by insurance greed was hovering over them all. Everyone was liable to be killed through medical incompetence and outright fraud. Either that or some revenge artist like himself might kill them out of pure rage over their collective cowardice in allowing it to happen. The insurance magnets were dining on caviar while the American citizens were being regularly fleeced and were left eating slop. Awake or not, they were all in danger.

  Gil Warner had two fish which he kept. “These have been hooked in their gills, Greg,” he explained. “They would die anyway if I let them go.”

  “Understood,” Al Buttons replied. “I have one I kept back that was bleeding from its gills. That’s really a shame. I’d rather none of them were hurt, to be quite honest. I hate to think I am inflicting pain on them.”

  Greg looked at Al. He was incredulous. What did Al think, anyway? Did he really think that fish fought against the hook, because it produced pleasure inside them to do so? Such an interpretation as to why fish pulled against their hooks was totally absurd. Of course, a hook irritated them. It also greatly destroyed their ability to swim back to their favorite place of rest. He wondered how Al could be so stupid.

  “I hate to tell you this, Al,” Greg said as he looked over at him, “but these fish don’t like having a hook set into them.”

  “You’re kidding, Greg,” Al said. “How in the world did you come up with that bit of intelligence?”

  “Easy,” Greg explained. “I simply used my brain.”

  “Really. How do you figure that?

  “Very simple. The hook hurts them as much as it would hurt you if I set one in your mouth. If it wasn’t hurting, they wouldn’t care, and then they wouldn’t fight. They’d just swim toward you voluntarily. But they don’t. They are in pain. They are trying to pull away from the source.”

  “I’d never have guessed that in a million years,” Al said. “I may have to rethink this hobby.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far. No need to have a baby over it. Besides, if you or I weren’t catching them, then some bigger fish might be swimming up behind and eating them. Or maybe a turtle would be biting into their tails, ripping it to shreds, pulling out the flesh. I’ve seen turtles do that. Besides, turtles even attack fish on a stringer. You leave a stringer in the water and come back later and all that’s left are the heads. A turtle has eaten the poor thing alive. So, you see, Al, there’s a lot more that is more painful than your little hook in a fish’s mouth. Like a turtle gnawing it alive from its tail all the way forward to its head.”

  “Nature is cruel, Al,” Gil Warner said.

  “I see.” Al tossed out another fly and watched it disappear inside the dark hole where the killer trout waited in its hidden lair for minnows, bugs, and seeds to fall through atop the current filled river bottom. Al passed off the attempt to piss him off with the story of hook pain causing the fish to fight back. Even if it were true, Al was still going to fish. These trout were going to die from something. If it wasn’t from Al’s hooks it’d be something far more painful like a gigantic turtle chewing them up from deep inside the settling darkness.