On the bank across the river, a few guys
fished. They spread...
On the bank across the river, a few guys
fished. They spread themselves across the small eyelid of sand and spoke to
each other now and then. The sun hit the river through the trees and the day
was warm and the shade felt good under the bridge where we sat watching the men
fish, listening to them talk – their voices traveled the underside of the
bridge to us, reached us at an echoey full volume. They didn’t say much, but we
heard each word when they did. When they laughed it sounded like giants
laughing. We spoke quietly. But we didn’t say much either. Instead we watched
water move, watched light move on water, kept an eye out for box turtles,
minnows, dragonflies, water striders skimming on the surface.
It seemed unlikely that these men would catch
anything, and maybe they weren’t that serious about it anyway because there
were no buckets or coolers or anything on the shore across the river that
would’ve taken a fish home if caught. They didn’t look at each other when they
talked; their eyes followed their lines into the water. Saturday afternoon,
summer’s end, the lines tossed, sunk, reeled, and tossed again. Perhaps it is
the sport most deeply linked with hope. Maybe this time. Maybe this time. Maybe
this time. The tug, the bite, the vibration up the line that jolts the heart
and says, got something.
The biggest of the three tossed his backpack
on his back and moved off the bank toward a path up into the woods. He told the
guys good luck, enjoy it. I held a pebble in my palm, considered tossing it
into the river, wanted to, but feared
it would scare the fish and annoy the men on the other shore. I held it,
watched minnows flicker close to land then head upstream into shadow. And then
the man who’d just walked up the path arrived on our side of shore. He was
barefoot, dark haired, twenty years old maybe, a thick guy with a soft face and
a smell that maybe he’d been wearing the same shirt for a few days in the
summer heat, had maybe been barefoot for a few days, too.
“I come over here to look for roaches,” he
said, lowering himself to a spot on the bank. “I can usually get a joint’s
worth on Saturday mornings. The kids come on Friday nights and I come the next
day. Yep. Here’s one. Here’s one. Sundays are good too, but Saturdays are
better.”
“Did you catch anything?”
He pulled himself back up to where we were
sitting.
“Want to see?”
He unzipped his backpack, just a regular
backpack like any kid going to school, and reached in and pulled out a massive
river carp, eighteen inches long and thick as a football. He gripped its thick,
slick body in his hand and it thrashed once. A full body jerk. I leapt back, startled
at seeing so much life.
“It’s okay,” he said. “They do that.”
He kept hold of the fish as its gills moved,
revealing a blood-red interior, the vents opening and closing without rush or
panic, vital remnant of our bodies’ most basic urge. Keep going.
“My dad has a recipe, mostly it’s spices. I’ll
gut it and cut it up and get the spices all over it and put it in a pan. No
problem.” He looked at the fish as he spoke. We all looked at the fish. We said
it was an amazing fish. A beautiful big fish. He put it back into his backpack,
straight in. No bucket, no plastic bag, just a big fish in a backpack and he
would feel it thrash against his back on his walk home.
[Muskellunge (+ Mosquito; 2 works from Under the North Star), 1980, Leonard Baskin]
