by Gary Paulsen
Still, summer was coming, and there would be work out in the North Dakota farms or farther west—West—where he could try to get work as a cowboy on a ranch.
They wouldn’t even know he was gone, really. They’d sit in their whiskey-wine-beer fog and not have a thought of him. Think he was fishing in the river or gone to the woods. Why think about a worthless kid at all? They didn’t know him, really. He was as much a stranger there as he was at school. Easy to leave and not look back.
A week passed, and then another week, and he did his normal life, normal days. No, not normal. Routine. That’s it. Settled into the routine of his regular life.
Once they passed out, he slept in the back seat of the ’51 Chevy coupe they had but never drove since they could walk to the liquor store. Stretch out across the seat like a fabric bed and doze. Risky if they came outside. Which they almost never did, but you never knew. Never knew.
Or, if they were still awake and conscious, he would head down to the dark basement of the old apartment building. Back behind the coal-fired furnace, he had dragged an old easy chair he found in a corner of the basement. Tattered. Stuffing coming out. Wire springs poking up. But comfortable for all that, soft and comfortable, and he could settle back in and down and fall asleep. Warm in the winter with the furnace going, and cool in the summer with the furnace shut down next to the dark and cool-damp basement walls.
He had a hot plate down there, in a corner on an old woodbox, with a wire up to the outlet on the side of the bare bulb that lit up with red-hot wire filaments. And a pot and an ancient toaster that would do one slice of bread at a time. The door on the side of the toaster flopped down to let the slice of bread slide down so it could be turned over and the little door closed to toast the other side against the glowing hot-red wires.
Some evenings he would get a whole loaf of white bread and a jar of peanut butter, and eat toast and peanut butter sitting in the chair. Crunchy with bits of nuts if he could get it, but creamy if that’s all he could find upstairs when they passed out. He liked that he could get more to chew with crunchy peanut butter. Now and then he would get some salty butter, and mix it with the peanut butter, spread thick on the bread, and now and then a jar of grape jelly—he had to buy or lift it himself and he didn’t like buying because it was expensive and lifting was risky because he might get caught and because it put him out in stores in the daylight when and where he wasn’t safe. He’d eat peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly slices until he was so full he felt like a wood tick. It would be perfect if he could get a small carton of milk to wash it down. Perfect.
When he was really hungry, which seemed almost all the time, he could eat a whole loaf except for slices of bread he had to throw to the rats so they would leave him alone.
He didn’t mind the rats here. They were small. The rats he had seen on the outskirts of bombed and gutted Manila when he was just a kid had been huge. Those rats looked like small dogs. They said the rats fed on the bodies of dead Japanese soldiers that had been buried in caves with bulldozers and that was why they were so big. And fat. He didn’t know that for certain, although he’d crawled into a small cave once and seen the bodies and their rusted rifles and rotten clothing and grinning skulls, and he wished to God he’d never gone into the cave. He’d crawled to get in there, and then he crawled out so fast he must have been a blur, and he didn’t sleep right for a month and longer. Still bothered him when he thought of the skulls. He’d seen big rats, but hadn’t seen them eating the bodies. Might have happened, though. You never knew. They were huge, and if they piled on, it might not take them long to finish off a whole body. They were big enough.
These rats were small, and when they figured out that he wasn’t dangerous, they accepted him and, in the end, would sit up on their back legs and beg when he was eating toast and peanut butter. My family, he thought once, sitting there watching them beg for food. My family of begging rats. Well hell, he thought, why not? Better than what he had.
Along with the hot plate and pot, he had picked up an old sheet-metal frying pan with a diamond shape stamped into the handle and words stamp-printed that read MADE IN CLEVELAND. A little rusty, but he worked off the rust and stain with steel wool, and it was all right. Sometimes he would cook a small piece of meat in the pan, frying it with sliced raw potatoes cooked in the meat’s own fat, and sprinkled with grains of coarse salt. Sop the juice up with a piece of white bread folded over and chew slowly, slow and easy. Made his mouth water just thinking on it.
Up in the morning. Either in the car or basement if he was in town and not out in the woods or upstream along the river. Eat a cold piece of bread with peanut butter wiped on it. Once, during the winter, he’d been upstairs when they were both passed out and he’d found a can of corned beef, which he could never afford to buy on his own. Square can with a key winder on the side to roll a strip of metal to open it and he ate the whole can for breakfast. Wiped the greasy inside of the can with his finger and sucked the taste off, mostly fat and strip meat, the fat melting in his mouth and meat sliding down into his stomach. Memory food. Like the steak the farmer had bought him at a café in North Dakota when they took in the last load of grain before the sheriff came when he was plowing and he was not arrested, but detained. Steak so good he ate the fat rimming the sides and wiped the plate with a piece of bread and sucked the burn-taste off the bone. Wished he had it again. Every day. Memory food. Like handfuls of sticky white rice with a dime can of oily sardines dumped on it in Manila on the streets. To be hungry, a young kid really tight hungry, alongside the blown-apart buildings, and have somebody give him the rice on a piece of cardboard and an opened can of sardines. Drink off the juice and put the sardines on the rice and stir it with his fingers and swallow without chewing. Lick the cardboard free of salty fish oil. Longtime memory food. Carry the memory forever.
So up from sleep, and eat what he could for a breakfast, and then out into the town. Daylight so he had to be careful. Moving down side streets and through alleys. He had a rusty old Hiawatha bike, no fenders, a slightly bent carrying rack on back, rattles from a loose chain, and wobbly wheels with loose spokes. But when he was in town, the bike helped him get around a little faster. In Manila, he’d had an old Japanese military bike like Rom’s. Painted black with symbols he couldn’t read on a piece of tin riveted to the front tube that led down to the fork. Rear rack made of rusty welded pipe and fat tires that were always leaking air. But he awkwardly learned to ride a two-wheeler even though it was too big for him because he was a small kid. The bike helped him get around the city for a little while before somebody stole it. He didn’t feel that bad because the tires were always getting flat and he’d have to find somebody with a tire pump. Besides, he had learned to catch rides with soldiers in jeeps and trucks when he had to move any distance.
If it was late spring or early summer, which it was now—his birthday taking him into thirteen was in the middle of May—the fish would be running up the river to spawn. They’d get caught below the small power dam by steel grates where they couldn’t get around or over. He’d watch as they circled in large surging pools of turbulent muddy water until they were so tired the rushing current would take them back downstream where the water was still and they could rest and clear the mud from their gills before they tried again.
The fish didn’t eat when they were spawning, so fishing for them with bait didn’t work. But he’d found they could be snagged with the right kind of hook.
He had a corner in the back of the basement where he hid things he didn’t want his parents or anybody else to take. Private things. His old lemonwood bow with a leather-wrapped handgrip and rawhide backing and arrows he made from second-grade cedar shafts he got for a quarter each from a catalog—along with a cheap fletcher to glue feathers on with model airplane glue and plastic nocks for a nickel each to take the corded string on the bow. A cutoff sleeve from an old leather jacket he saw in the alley trash that he sewed into a shoulder quiver with nylon fishline—sixty
-pound test—and a finger tab made from old boot leather cut to the shape of his fingers. Points for the arrows were expensive, but he found that empty .38 cartridge cases would glue on just right and made good blunts to take small animals. He knew the cops carried .38 revolvers and they were familiar with him from the times he ran off, so they gave him a box of fired brass collected from the shooting range. Fifty in a box. Enough to last him his whole life. They’d take down grouse, rabbits, big gray squirrels if he caught one low on a tree. If they were too high up, he didn’t shoot because if he missed—and he did, often, shooting up—the arrow would go past the squirrel and out of sight, lost in the woods.
In the corner with the bow, he kept his fishing gear, too. An old spring-steel rod with a still older Shakespeare sturdy baitcasting reel filled with the heavy fishline. No sport there. Heavy cord and steel leaders. Not fly fishing for ten-inch fish. Fishing gear was for taking meat, catching food, and you never knew what size fish you might get in the muddy river. An ugly rig, strong, but not good for snagging.
Had to touch, feel the line, when snagging. The snagging setup was a short, thick line wrapped around a stick of wood—not over thirty feet—and a heavy steel leader clipped hard to a large, specially sharpened treble hook. The hook had to sink in the roiling water below the dam, but this was still too light, even as heavy as it was, so he hardwired a large sinker or a steel railroad bolt-nut beneath the hook and out of the way.
He took the snagging gear from the hiding place and made his way on the old Hiawatha bicycle to the power dam through alleys and back streets, clunking and rattling. Above the spillway at the bottom of the dam was a stand of brush. Thick willows with early leaves. He hid the bike in the willows. Ugly as it was, he didn’t think anybody would steal it, but … just that. But. Hide it anyway. He’d hang back in the willows himself to watch the dam and spillway until he was sure. Nobody else was there—the boys who had big shoulders and tried to hurt him never came down to the dam. They didn’t fish, but … But. Had to think on it all the time to stay safe. The workers inside the dam mostly either went into town for beer or stayed inside the brick building drinking coffee, playing checkers or five-card gin rummy. They never looked down at the spillway. The water was gone by then, had worked through the dam. Why look at it?
When it was clear, he went down to the concrete ledge over the spillway and unwound the snagging line, lowering it over the water. He scraped his fingers on the concrete to make them more sensitive, and swung the snag hook forward up the current to drop into the water and drift back in the flowing depths next to the wall.
Snagging was an art.
The fish, trying to swim upstream against the rushing water coming from the spillway, worked tight along the wall where it was easier to swim. You swung the hook forward, set it down in the water, let it slide back against the concrete wall until you felt it bump something.
Nose of a fish.
Pull up sharply, quickly, set the hook in the lower jaw, and pull the fish hand over hand. Not a sport, this was not a hobby. You needed strength to take fish for food.
No art there. Slide and jerk and you caught a fish. Big whoop.
The art came in knowing what kind of fish you were snagging. Carp swam at the same time as other fish, mixed in. But nobody wanted carp, they were too bony and lived on the bottom in the mud. The meat was soft and tasted muddy, people said, so he never ate one. Somebody told him they ate carp in China. Fried them whole in a sheet-metal bowl over an open fire. Left the scales on and the guts inside. Picked the meat out of the bones by hand. But he didn’t know whether it was true or not; for sure, nobody here wanted them or ate them. People here wanted walleyes and northern pike. Mostly large walleyes so they could cut filets off the side. Eat the cheeks and eyes. Good meat.
Walleyes and northern pike had hard noses, tough bone jaws out in front. Carp had soft noses, spongy mouths and lips, sucker mouths for feeding on the bottom.
Swing the hook forward and let it slide back. Fishline across the finger rough-sanded on the concrete to make it more sensitive. Feel it. Feel it slide along the concrete. When it hit a fish front, the line would hesitate, the hook would bounce a little. Just a touch on the line and, if it was a soft bounce, let it roll off to the side. Felt it through the touchy finger—soft bounce meant a bottom-feeder mudfish.
Harder hit, really hard hit—a kind of click-hit and a jerk-up—and you knew you had a northern or walleye under the jaw. Pull him up, swing hard and up on the bank in back of you, and you had food. Filets with tiny Y-bones to pick out and spit away if it was a northern. Clean white-meat filets if it was a walleye.
This time, this early summer when he was just thirteen, in the middle of the morning, it was a walleye. Five, maybe six pounds. Good-size male, a golden brown on his sides. But this morning it was not for food, not food for him at any rate.
He had a deal with the Northern Lights saloon, which he first approached mainly because his parents never drank there so no one knew who they, or he, were. Elmer Peterson was an old Swede who had owned the bar as long as the boy was alive and more, more years than the boy knew. They had what the boy called a deal and Elmer called an arrangement. Elmer had such a thick Swedish accent the word seemed to trip coming out of his mouth. But the old man liked to use the word, like it made him something more than he thought he was, and it made the boy smile every time he heard it. Made him smile every time Elmer tried to use big English words.
The Northern Lights had empty three-pound coffee cans along the bar floor for spittoons, and sawdust on the floor in case men missed the coffee cans with tobacco juice. No stools. Men, rough men, men who worked the river for logging below the dam or drove yellow bulldozers and graders on the road crews, drank standing at the bar. Just beer. But a lot of it. Drank until they were ready to fall down. The bar had a raised wooden handrail along the front edge, and men would hold that rail with one hand and drink with the other, spitting on the floor or into the coffee cans. Hold the rail until it didn’t keep them up any longer and then stagger over to some plank benches in the rear to sleep—pass out, really—until they had slept it off and could walk to leave.
It was here he took the walleye. Anytime he caught a fish too big to cook in the basement on the hot plate, he took it to the Northern Lights bar, where he had the arrangement with Elmer. The bar had an ancient cooler in the back and Elmer would pay the boy for the fish and put them on ice in the cooler to sell to his patrons. Elmer left the guts in the fish to keep the weight up and the meat good. Gut them, and it made them lighter and the meat dried from the inside, and the patrons wanted bigger fish with soft, moist fresh meat. Heavier fish. That’s what he called them. His patrons. Except it came out “patroons.”
Not the men drinking standing at the bar. They weren’t his patrons. They didn’t pay for fish. If they wanted fish, they would get their own. And if they wanted to cut their drunk down early by eating, Elmer had a grill in back of the bar he kept hot and greased from a five-gallon metal bucket of lard on the floor. Kept a lid on that bucket so nobody could spit in it.
On the grill, Elmer cooked thin, stamped-out meat patties in thick hot lard. Swore they were beef, but the boy had eaten them once and didn’t believe they were beef. Could have been anything. Like in Manila when he ate meat on rice off pieces of cardboard. Could be dog, maybe. Or sheep. Surely wasn’t beef. Elmer wiped small, thin buns in the grease next to the meat until the buns were burned black-brown and dripping grease. He slapped the meat between the two buns, dropped it hot and smoking on a piece of ripped-square day-old newspaper on the bar, and held out his hand.
Quarter and a dime. Thirty-five cents. Hamburger for a quarter and a dime. Most of the men didn’t eat them, didn’t want to slow their drunk, but Elmer kept the grease bucket and off-meat burgers for the same reason he kept the fish in the cooler—the patrons.
Tourists.
Word of the saloon spread. Men, and sometimes men with women, came to fish the river above the dam for
the legendary muskies. Said they went up to fifty pounds, though the boy had never heard of one that big being caught. Still, they came from cities and sometimes even other states, towing their boats on trailers, and almost all of them wanted to see the Northern Lights saloon.
Place drew them like flies. They thought the saloon was what they called local color. Something to see and take home. The bar was too dark to take pictures and Elmer wouldn’t have let them anyway, so it had to be enough to just sit and see, get a beer and eat an off-meat burger on a smoke-fired, greasy bun, and see the men standing at the bar drinking.
There were two seedy booths against the wall opposite the bar. Phony leather seats covered in puke stains and worse. Chipped and stained and whittle-carved wooden tables coming out from the wall where the tourists could sit and drink a pony-piss beer and eat a grease-bomb burger off a piece of dirty newspaper. Then go home and brag about how tough they were to have been there. How grimy it had been, greasy. Local color.
Most of the patrons knew about boats on trailers and beer and expensive fishing gear, but they didn’t know how to fish. They wanted something for pictures, something to take home and brag about at the office, maybe cook on their backyard barbecues.
