by Mark Slouka
Everybody watched him pull up, throw the noose over the middle post, hoist himself painfully out of the boat. By dusk he was back on the dock. We could barely make him out. It must have been June because there were fireflies and he stood there for what seemed like a long time and I remember swallows flicking down around his head and you could smell the rain. The lamp in the Bauer cabin went on, making a yellow trail on the water. It ran a few feet out from Odwin’s dock like a path. You could see the water all pocked and busy, but it wasn’t rain yet, only gnats and mayflies and the lapping rings of fish sipping off the surface. I don’t remember seeing him get into the boat, but suddenly the pale rectangle of the dock was empty and undisturbed and the dark bulk of the boat was gone and there was just the steady creak and thump of a loose oarlock bumping against the wood.
There was much talk about all this, and Odwin wasn’t a strong man, or a ruthless one. My father was the only one who’d speak to him still, and even he did it not for Odwin, not out of love or respect or mercy, but because no one else would, which to my father had always seemed like a fine reason for doing anything. So no one was surprised when Odwin barely lasted out the season, packed his things and left. Certain kinds of love can only stand so much resistance.
And Odwin was the greatest of lovers in his own sad way. It wasn’t obsession that kept him out on that boat as the moon rose and set and the stars wheeled on their axis like a slowing merry-go-round. It was love. On a small road after dark one night (a grown man now), I heard voices on a wide porch and thought for a moment they were speaking in the language I hadn’t heard since long before my father died. I was wrong, it was just a trick of the breeze or the night, but in those few seconds before I realized my mistake my breath had caught in my chest and tears had gushed to my eyes and I felt like a child stumbling up the final steps to home. I understood Odwin then, though I could never know the particular deserts he’d traveled, the specific thirst he hadn’t even known he was enduring until, like some mad Bedouin wandering the empty quarter, he stumbled upon the thing he’d forgotten he’d been searching for and in that moment lost not his mind but his heart.
The bend of reed, the shallow bulge of water, the tucked ecstasy of damselflies linked on his sleeve—these things and a thousand like them he loved. The rods, the reels, the lures—these were just the paraphernalia of courtship. He fished the way suitors of old would play cribbage or gin rummy, not because they cared for cards but because it was their ticket into the sanctum, into the presence of their intended. Like them he could hardly bring himself to pay attention to the game, and, also like them, he couldn’t seem to lose. The lake offered up its prizes to him, and he happily dragged them home.
Two fish—extravagant, absurd—stand out from all the others. The first was a bass twenty-three inches long with a big potbelly and a mouth twice the size of a man’s fist, this out of a lake where anything over fifteen inches would magically attract small knots of boys who would hover nearby, whispering and pointing, and who wouldn’t leave until the fish (gutted, cleaned, and wrapped) had disappeared into the freezer.
But the other was unforgettable. My father woke me early one morning to see it. “You don’t want to miss this,” he said. “Odwin’s dragged up something special.” It was laid out on the stones of the veranda when we got there, a gleaming yellow-green beast fully half the length of an oar. I was six and a half that summer. I’d never seen a pickerel before. I remember there was moss and little tufts of grass growing between the rocks. My father walked out back to look for Odwin.
It was getting hot. I stared at the canary-yellow diamonds on its sides, the sharp white teeth in the partly open mouth still locked on the diving-minnow lure he’d caught it on, the way the colors faded into the dark-olive back … I remember the yellow jacket that settled on its long, bill-like snout and moved down the jaw, tentatively touching the cartilage flap of the mouth, the teeth, then the dark-green cheek plate near the eye. The fish didn’t move. I stood away. There was something horrible about this: the delicate, strangled body, the venomous yellow abdomen twitching spastically, edging toward that great staring eye. I half expected the fish to start thrashing at any moment and I remember I thought of walking away, and even started to, but the wasp was already at the rim of that clouding pool. And I saw its forelegs dip down—gently, almost respectfully—and it was like a swimmer testing familiar water, or an acolyte paying homage at some long-forgotten shrine.
IV. Fear
They moved into the cabin up the hill in midsummer, the year I turned twelve. One day we heard a man laugh and then a woman squealing, “Put me down, you bastard, I swear I’ll kill you, I’ll …,” and we saw him walk out on the dock holding on to her legs and her beating on his back with her fists, and then he grabbed his hat, turned once, and flung her fully clothed and furious into the water. “Looks like neighbors,” my father said. From that moment on the lake adjusted to a new topography. My world circled around them like a plate on a pin.
It was particularly hot that summer, or maybe I just remember it that way. Every morning the cicadas would ratchet up and by breakfast the sky would start to whine and all day a thin head of clouds would build to the west but nothing ever happened. Even swimming didn’t help—the top three feet were as warm as the air. We’d dive down into the olive dusk, cold as mud, and hug the boulders of the old pasture wall to keep from floating up, but that only made the surface and the overheated air still worse. Sitting on the boat I’d listen to the birds fighting in the locked maples over the road. I was like the blackwater pockets in the spillway by the dam—choking, crazy with life.
On a boat one afternoon with the water stamped flat and hot, I pulled in a small bass with a minnow still sticking out of its throat. I tugged on the minnow’s tail and it slipped out of the creamy vortex of guts as easily as a cooked almond slides out of its skin. All afternoon I’d been dunking my head over the stern. And suddenly I did something I didn’t know I was going to do: I put the tip of my finger where the minnow had been, to see what it was like. The inside of the fish’s throat was smooth as vanilla pudding, and when I pushed deeper it started to swallow at me with quick, hard draws and I jerked my hand out quick and threw that bass out over the water so hard it skipped. It seemed everything was like that. I hardly knew what I’d do next. I was quick to anger, quick to tears, an utter mystery to myself.
Things would change in ways I didn’t expect. Cleaning fish, for example. I’d been doing it since I was seven. I’d hold them in an old pink towel with just their head sticking out and give them a good whack with a smooth, bent iron, then put the tip of the knife into the vent and cut up through the belly to the gills. The knife would make a soft, ropy sound and the white skin would collapse a bit like a man pulling in his cheeks, and if you lifted up a side you could see the guts all connected. The heart was right up front, tucked under the gills: small, dull red, easy to pop. It reminded me of the thin little bubbles we used to suck and twist out of the tatters of burst balloons. Back behind the liver was the stomach, sort of a mud-colored bag: inside you could sometimes find whole minnows, crawfish … once I found a small frog turned creamy white and another time a fake gold earring. I never went near the gall bladder. I’d cut it once by accident, and it leaked thick and yellow and smelled like old men’s pee and reminded me of that time at the city train station a man had stood next to me looking straight up at the ceiling like there was some message written there and all the time shaking his wrinkled cock like an old dog wags its tail.
Against the vaulted roof of the spine was a dove-gray bladder you could poke with your finger. I’d always liked doing this but that summer for some reason I started trying not to. I’d make little bets with myself, imagining rewards, picturing horrors if I didn’t stop. Usually I’d do it anyway. It wouldn’t hiss or pop but only tear thin and sweet, and I’d wash the meat clean under the outside faucet, picking out the little bits of blood with my fingers. It was that way with everything, more or less.
There were three of them, the oldest hardly twenty-two, polite and somehow dangerous, and it surprised no one when the state police appeared on the dirt road and pulled into their drive, only that they left soon afterward, taking no one with them. There was one who’d call out to me sometimes when I rowed by. He’d be sitting up on the stone porch with his boots up on the rail wearing only a pair of pants and a big broad hat with a turned rim, and he’d ask me how the fishing was or where I thought he’d have the best luck, and sometimes somebody else would say something from inside and he’d say, “Why don’t you shut up, Tucker,” without even turning around, and I’d row away, repeating the words he’d said and the way he’d said them, flattered that he’d talk to me at all. Sometimes I’d see her leaning in the dark of the doorway, eating something off a paper plate with her hands, then licking her fingers. It was always hot, and sometimes she’d turn half away and lift the hair off the back of her neck with her forearms.
Every night as lightning flashed like some rapid code above the horizon of trees they’d be out on the boat, setting a trotline from the end of their dock to a branch hanging over the water. The next morning one of them would lift the line with a grunt, and there, dangling on the end of a dozen small drop lines, would be foot-long bullheads, black-speckled crappies, sometimes a bass or a small snapping turtle. Then somebody would go out and pull hand over hand along the line, cutting the fish into the boat with a pair of scissors, dumping the rest over the side. I’d never seen a trotline before.
“Hell, easy,” said the one who talked to me. “Come on by and I’ll show you how to skin a catfish.”
The sky had been rumbling since noon, and where the path left the uncut meadow and entered the trees it was like dusk. It was hot, and when I slapped at the gnats and deerflies that circled around my face they stuck to my skin and hair and I had to pick them loose with my fingers. They were all sitting on the porch when I got there. Music was coming from inside and I could see him already working on the fish, straddling a bench with a cleaning board nailed to it crossways, the fish jammed headfirst in a bucket of water by his side.
She was lying in a hammock strung between a hook in the cabin wall and another sunk into the tree at the corner of the porch, wearing only a long skirt and a man’s sleeveless T-shirt, and I could see the sweat on her arms and her throat and the damp curve of her breathing. The hammock was barely moving. She’d pulled up her skirt to get some air, and one raised knee tipped outward slightly, then closed with each swing of the pendulum. Her arm, hanging loose over the side, trailed slowly over the rocks. She’d been facing my way when I appeared by the side of the cabin. She didn’t say anything—if her eyes had been closed I’d have thought she was sleeping—and after a few moments simply turned her head the other way. One of the men got up and walked into the cabin. No one else said anything either.
He must have known I was there all along. “Well, come over here, boss,” he said, without turning around. “You ever see this before?” I could see sweaty curls of black hair sticking out from under his hat. Reaching into the bucket, he pulled out a foot-long bullhead, laid it belly-down on the board, and quickly poked a small hole in the top of its skull with the tip of the fillet knife, then, reaching up to the railing, picked up what looked like a wheat straw and slipped it into the hole. Suddenly I felt myself swallowing high up in my throat like I was going to be sick. The tail trembled with current. He moved the straw, delicately, as though mixing a small drink, and the fish shuddered again and was still. “See that?” he said.
A man’s voice said something from the house and I could hear her laugh behind me. “Why don’t you give your little friend a drink, Troy?” Her voice was like her fingers tracing over the rocks. Again the other said something I couldn’t make out. She turned to the house. “Maybe I will, asshole. At least he’d know what to do with it.”
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t say anything. I was suddenly just scared. I could see the lake, still and dark as oil, but everything looked different from here—the tilting, unfamiliar dock, the float on its barrels, too close to the cove, like the cables had snapped or the anchor broken loose. Through a space in the leaves I could see my father walk out on our dock, and it was as though I were seeing him from another world. I willed him to stay. I watched him light a cigarette with quick, familiar movements. After a while he turned and walked back, disappearing. A fish swirled tight by the shore.
“You make a cut here,” the man said, and I watched him slice in a half circle behind the gills and again at the base of the tail and four more lengthwise and then, grabbing a small flap with a pair of pliers, peel the brown skin down like you would a banana, baring the clean white meat underneath. Two quick moves and the whiskered head, spine, and tail dropped on an open newspaper. He reached for another. I wanted to run.
I don’t know how long I stood there, trapped by things I didn’t know: the spotted blade, the blood-marked straw, the pliers going about their business, and at my back the gently creaking mesh, the small sounds of exhaustion—a long sigh, a stretching yawn.
I knew he was there before I heard the hammock move behind me. “Hello,” she said, startled.
I turned around. “I thought I might find you here,” he said quietly, looking at me. “If you’re hungry, it’s time for dinner.”
We went back up the hill and into the light of the meadow, neither of us saying anything. Here and there I could see the lake through the trees, rearranging itself. A flash of light cracked low on the horizon and a few fat drops hit the tall grasses, making them jerk and nod in the still air.
“Come on, let’s run,” said my father.
V. Truth
And then there was the water at the dam that spilled over the boards in their iron sleeves and down around the rocks and small islands with whippy three-foot saplings doomed to a season, maybe two, before the next big rain in May or June ripped them loose and sent them floating like pruned branches in the current.
This was small water: a short, undercut bank, a thigh-deep hole along a toppled tree still partly rooted, its branches now growing vertically like trees in their own right but still feeding off that troubling, recumbent soil. No one over twelve would notice it. Where the spillway flattened out and ran under the one-lane wooden bridge, it slowed to a stream less than five strides across. The bridge was so low you couldn’t stand up, and when cars rumbled over, sand and small pebbles would hiss into the water and the boards would groan and you’d wonder if this was the time they’d give and crack and the steel belly of some car would come crushing down into the wet, dark place you were hiding in. That stream was crammed full of fish (trapped by the dam on one end and a long, sandy shoal on the other) that had been carried over the spillway as fingerlings: bluegill and pumpkinseed and redear, the occasional bullhead or perch or small bass. The shadows were ridged and thick with their backs, and they’d churn across the shallows in great, nervous schools. We’d chase them back and forth for hours with our nets, herding them like sheep into the dead ends under the rocks and banks and back under the bridge against the base of the spillway, trying to see how many we could get to a scoop.
It had been raining for a week and now it had stopped, though everything still ran water and the clouds scraped low and heavy over the hills. The lake was brown, the trees along the shore a foot deep in water. I went down to the stream to see what it was like, carrying a long-handled salmon net I used for snapping turtles on the open lake. It had a two-inch mesh, much too big for anything I might find there, but I’d torn the netting on my other one so I took it with me anyway.
I could hear the water long before I got to the bridge, bigger now, bulging up over the fallen tree and rushing in a straight gray line through the woods. The water looked barren—scoured smooth and dead. I sat on the bridge for a while, watching broken half tunnels of bark and leafy branches appear from under the wood and disappear downstream, and then, having nothing better to do, got up to walk along the bank. Fifty yards
down I recognized a small, sink-sized pool, relatively unchanged, and stuck the handle in to test the strength of the current.
A tail wide as a dinner plate slapped the water and disappeared. I stared as though a large pig had stuck its snout above the surface, snorted, and vanished. It was simply impossible. This was a bluegill hole hardly bigger than a kitchen pot. A fish that large would have to be curled like a doughnut to fit at all.
At ten the eyes still occasionally win over the mind; I spun the net like a baton, stabbed it into the hole (so narrow the rim just made it), and, leaning in, forked a huge fish with big silver scales out onto the bank. It promptly flopped out of the mesh. I tackled it, literally wrestled it flat. I probably screamed when it finned me in the stomach (it must have hurt, and I flaunted the neat row of small black puncture holes like a certificate of honor for weeks), but I don’t remember.
I do remember leaving the net behind and dragging it by the gills (which also cut me fairly well, as I discovered later) almost half a mile back down the grassy middle of the road as it started to rain again and the fish revived every few minutes just enough to thrash loose and leap across the dirt and into the roadside weeds. Pictures were taken. No one had ever seen a carp around there before. It measured thirty-four inches by the yellow cloth tape my mother kept in her sewing kit, the one in the circular case with the button that sucked it all back in when you pressed it. My mother wanted to keep the fish for soup, but it would have been a big job and it was raining and the fish still alive, its plate-size gills working hard, so we picked it up and hauled it to the end of the dock and threw it like a log into the water. It lay stunned just beneath the hissing rain, then churned into the dark. “Be a lonely life,” my father said. “Nothing like him in this puddle, that’s for goddamn sure.”
