The Second Fly Caster: Fatherhood, Recovery and an Unforgettable Tournament

by Randy Kadish

three-quarters of the way, slowly lower the rod to about two o’clock. That way, you’ll increase the length, and therefore the power of your forward casting stroke. Does that make sense?”

  “Perfect sense, Shane.”

  He turned and walked away.

  “Shane!”

  He turned back towards me.

  I asked, “How come you forfeited your turn?”

  He looked up, stared into space and then back at me. Scared I had asked the wrong question, I wanted to run away, but a voice inside me told me not to, and then—I’m not certain whether it happened in my mind or in his face—his stare softened, reached out to me and pulled me close to him.

  “I knew who your father was from a picture in last year’s newspaper,” he said. “When I watched you holding his hand—well, I guess the way you looked up at him told me to, to—your father is a great, great caster. You should always be proud of him. I don’t think I could’ve beaten him.”

  He was lying, I knew. “Maybe you—”

  “Erik,” he interrupted. “I wish I had a father who was a great caster.” Shane smiled again.

  I thought of asking him if he had ever been ashamed of his father for drinking, but the words, like a fly hooked on a branch, somehow got stuck inside me, maybe because deep down I was really a coward. I promised myself I would ask Shane the question if I ever saw him again, but a voice inside me told me I never would.

  The voice was right; my father never competed against Shane and won two more casting championships, but never cast farther than a hundred feet.

  But then something I didn’t understand happened: My father started drinking again and soon lost his job. My mother had to go to work as a cook. Several times I found her sitting by herself in the kitchen and crying. I knew enough not to ask why, and she knew enough to tell me that my father’s drinking wasn’t her fault or mine. Still, I often wondered whether my father drank because I was small and not a great athlete who would one day erase his disappointment at not making it to the major leagues.

  Night after night, instead of praying for the Fire Birds to win, I crossed my fingers and prayed for my father to stop drinking. My prayers, however, like a thinning mist, dissolved and went unanswered. Again I wondered if there was a God.

  My parents fought more and more about my father’s drinking; and when they did I ran into my room, closed the door, turned on my TV real loud and dreamed that I too was a courageous hero, like the Fugitive or Sergeant Saunders.

  I turned eighteen and saw a way to leave home. The Army offered me college tuition if I joined and completed a two-year enlistment. They also offered me a chance to fight for something good: defeating Communism.

  I finished boot camp and was flown halfway across the world. As the plane jetted down, I looked out the window and thought, So, this beautiful, beautiful country is Vietnam.

  Two weeks later, my regiment came under a surprise attack. As we tried to cross a rice field, deafening bombs exploded all around us, ripping apart the bodies of two of my friends. Suddenly, the bombing stopped. Everything got real quiet, and for a few seconds I wondered if I were really dead. I wasn’t, I realized, but I knew I was trapped in a hell that had fallen down, somehow, to earth. Lieutenant Barnes ordered us to run for the cover of the woods. We did, but then, from behind some trees, I saw what looked like miniature lightning. A split second later I heard the thunder of machine-fire and the thudding sound of bullets hitting flesh and bones. The living and the dead hit the ground. Some of the wounded cried. I covered my ears, but I still heard Billy Jenkins call for his mother, again and again. Then he was silent. Jenkins, I guessed, was dead. The machine gun fire continued, and I heard more thuds and screams. I was sure that I too was going to die. Then, in my mind, I saw my father holding up a fly casting trophy, and I heard him thank God. Though I still wasn’t sure if I believed in God, I prayed for him to save me.

  Maybe, just maybe, he did, because finally, after what seemed like a billion moments, our bombs streaked right into enemy machine gunners and blew them to bits. Again there was silence, then laughter, the laughter, I knew, of my surviving friends. I stood up, looked at the blue sky and felt grateful to be alive.

  But my real-life nightmare didn’t end. A few weeks later my regiment marched into a farming village that we suspected was being looted regularly by the Viet Cong. But as it turned out, looting was the least of it. We discovered about fifty dead bodies of men, women and children. One dead little girl had her arm around a dead little boy, her brother, I assumed. The people of the village, we were later told, had been slaughtered by the Viet Cong. Suddenly, the idea of fighting Communism didn’t seem like something completely good.

  That night, I tried to get the images of the dead civilians out of my mind, but I couldn’t. I went into my tent. Some of my friends were drinking whiskey and laughing. Bob Collins asked me if I wanted a drink.

  I thought of my father’s drinking and of how I had promised myself that I would never drink.

  Bob again asked.

  I took a drink, and then another and another, and from that day on I got drunk almost every night.

  Luckily, I survived the war and was transferred to Fort Dix in New Jersey, but in reality I couldn’t leave the horror of the war behind.

  I continued to drink.

  I walked into my barrack. A yellow telegram was on my bed. The telegram was from my mother. It read: “Your father is very sick. Wants to see you.”

  Feeling as if I had been hit by a punch, I immediately went to my commanding officer and got a pass. Less than an hour later I left Fort Dix and headed home.

  The house was empty. A note was on the dining room table. I picked it up and then ran to the local hospital.

  My father lay in bed. He was emaciated and pale. Long, thin tubes went into his arms and nose. I almost didn’t recognize him. My mother held his hand. She looked at me with eyes that seemed as heavy as lead.

  “Cancer,” she said.

  I cried.

  “Thanks for coming,” my father whispered. “I never thought I could get cancer. Well, better me than you or mom. Erik, there’s something I should’ve told you years ago. I’m going to tell it to you now, while there’s still time. You know that old elbow injury of mine?”

  “Yes.”

  “It never happened. The truth was, the truth is, I wasn’t good enough to make it to the major leagues. I only wish I could have accepted that and not lived a lie.”

  For some reason I heard Shane Riley’s words, You should always be proud of him. I stated, “That doesn’t matter anymore. Just because you lied to yourself about one thing it doesn’t mean you lived a lie. You lived to be the best fly caster in this state, and you were. Your casting championships are an eternal proof of it.”

  He smiled.

  I asked, “Do you remember that tournament when Shane Riley forfeited his—I mean, didn’t show up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was so scared that he would beat you.”

  “You know, so was I.”

  “Maybe Shane Riley was a figment of the old stranger’s imagination.”

  My father’s eyes opened real wide. “Or maybe he wasn’t, and maybe if he had showed up—you see, the truth I’ve finally come to see is that fly casting isn’t about competing against others. It’s about finding ways of getting better and better and of competing against ourselves, and then it’s about one day accepting that, even though we’ve never made a perfect fly cast, we’ve made the best cast we can. I’m sorry if that sounds a little corny, but at least it isn’t a lie.”

  “Dad, it doesn’t sound corny at all.”

  He closed his eyes and squeezed my hand.

  The next day he died.

  One year later, after I had been honorably discharged from the Army and was attending a local junior college, one of my old friends called and asked if I wanted to play on his softball team. Because I had surprised myself by becoming a good softball player in the Fort Dix pick-up games, I to
ld him I would. I went up to our attic and looked through cardboard boxes for my old baseball glove. I found my glove. Below it were newspaper stories about the fly-casting tournaments my father had won. I read the last story and then saw folded sheets of yellow writing paper on the bottom of the box. I unfolded the sheets. They were my father’s handwritten notes on the techniques of long-distance fly casting. For some reason it didn’t seem right for his techniques—the results of years and years of his casting experiments—to lie unseen in a worthless box. I went downstairs, sat at my desk spent hours and hours shaping my father’s techniques into an article. The next day I took the article to a calligrapher who beautifully wrote it out on parchment-like paper. I then mounted the article in a gold frame and hung it on our living room wall. Again I felt proud.

  When mother came home from work, I showed her what I had done. She stared at my father’s techniques, and then she cried.

  I asked her why.

  “Erik, I—now for the first time I see so much good in what your father did. I just wish I could have seen it back then, but I guess I resented the time he spent fly casting instead of being with me. Maybe if I had he never would have gone back to drinking. Was I being selfish back then? Was I wrong?”

  “Mother, we can’t blame ourselves for not seeing certain things back then.”

  She smiled, stiffly, and then she hugged me. Together we cried.

  And so, for a few days the good thoughts I had of my